Audience engagement careers aren’t ladders — they’re rivers
Uncover your strengths across roles through this 10-minute mapping exercise
A version of this post first appeared in “Explore Your Career River,” a weekly newsletter examining how to pursue a fulfilling career. Join the career river community at careerriver.substack.com.
When Alisha Wang Saville started working to support engagement professionals in 2018 as Gather’s community manager, she had already spent years working at nonprofit and advocacy organizations.
“It was not exactly a second career but definitely a bit of a pivot,” said Saville, now the News Voices Program Manager at Free Press.
Since then, she’s seen more newsrooms, from legacy publications to startups and hyperlocal outlets, increasingly adopt audience and community engagement into their work. With the increase in awareness has come an increase in jobs. But while the field has grown, Saville notes it’s not necessarily clear what a career trajectory for engagement journalism is supposed to be.
“Everyone I’ve known so far has sort of pieced it together,” she said.
My own experience piecing together my journalism career led me to create the career river framework in 2021. Instead of viewing our professional lives as a ladder to climb, the career river allows us to discover many fulfilling routes to explore.
This is especially useful in a field such as engagement journalism, which is rapidly developing. In this post, I’ll walk you through a quick exercise to help reframe your career as a river instead of a linear path, and uncover any patterns in the type of work you are most interested in pursuing, regardless of job title.
Map your career river
Katherine Nagasawa recently completed this exercise, revealing the common thread among her jobs in journalism and producing digital history curriculums. After 10 minutes, she said the finished sketch showed her how she had built up skills for her current role as engagement and impact manager at El Tímpano, a nonprofit newsroom that serves Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities.
“I can see how so much of the skills for each role can translate,” she said. “To know that I can bring that to different spaces or different roles is so heartening.”
Grab something to write with and something to write on, and feel free to adjust these instructions however makes sense to you. Ready?
1. Places you’ve worked
At the top of the page, write out the places you have worked. This could be specific companies or, more broadly, different fields or industries. If you haven’t worked in more than one place, that’s fine, add it to the top of your sheet.
2. What you’re seeking
On the side of your sheet, consider what you are seeking to achieve over time in your career. I’ve labeled this on the chart as “level of impact,” but it could also be deepening understanding, or building connections, or any number of outcomes. On my own chart, I decided to track the level of managerial oversight of my roles — no employees toward the top, some direct reports toward the middle, and overseeing an entire department toward the bottom. To me, supporting others in their roles is one of the most rewarding aspects of my professional life.
This part may be tricky, and that’s a good sign. It means you’re considering your career in a new light. Take some time to consider what you’re currently seeking to accomplish in your career and list it at the side. You may also want to try a few different impact measures and see what fits best.
3. Mapping your river
Now it’s time to put any roles that you’ve had on the chart, based on the outcome metric you selected. Don’t get too caught up in listing every job title you ever had. Instead, focus on the significant career moments, particularly when you grew your skills or shifted somewhere new.
If you haven’t had multiple roles, you can still complete the exercise thinking about roles you’re interested in pursuing.
4. Uncover transferable skills
Your river is now starting to take shape! Notice where you were able to move into higher-impact roles, and how each position may have informed what followed. Are there any areas of your map where what at first glance looked like a step “back” actually allowed you to move in a new direction?
In this last step, consider what skills you have found most fulfilling to use in each area. Focus on what Dick Bolles, author of “What Color is Your Parachute,” deems transferable skills, which you can use from one job to another without any additional training. It can help to focus on using verbs for this list, for example: analyze, coach, build. And then list out a few for each role or group of roles. Note which skills meant the most to you, even if they weren’t necessarily the most important for that particular job.
That’s it! Take a look and see what stands out to you. Does visualizing your career in this way shift how you view your professional progress? Did you notice something that’s been a common theme beneath seemingly disparate roles?
When Nagasawa completed her sketch, she noticed points where she had used similar skills at different roles, and some skills that duplicated across several different sectors.
When she left public media, Nagasawa wondered if she’d ever be able to come back to journalism.
But her experience since then allowed her to develop the skill set that she’s using at her new role, back in news.
“I don’t feel like my path has to be linearly journalism or linearly media education,” she said, after finishing her map. “It can flow between both.”
Saville suggested considering the communities, topics and skills you want to work with as you design an audience development career.
While you’re not alone if you’ve felt worried about how best to grow in this field, she said, others are willing to share their experiences.
“If you can pay attention to what you value and what interests you, and talk with people about that,” Saville said, “then openings you never imagined are going to reveal themselves.”
Join the career river community at careerriver.substack.com.
