Alicia Wala

I would say two things. First, there's a lot of hard work that sometimes goes unseen, so I'm always looking for the next challenge and striving to be better, whether that's proactively offered or something that I need to seek out on my own. At the same time, being able to make connections and leverage my network has been crucial. I know that's the less fun version, but really just being personable in your job and doing a good job in your day-to-day builds up the network. Having a career coach helped me build the confidence to build my network, if that makes sense. Working with a career coach around 2022 was pivotal to my career trajectory - it taught me so many things about myself, like what I value in a job, what makes me excited and brings joy to the workplace, and how to position myself in conversations moving forward. I genuinely feel like investing in career coaching was pivotal to my career trajectory since then, and I'm so grateful for that.

I definitely recommend reaching out to people. I know it's sometimes awkward to go on LinkedIn and be like, hi, my name is so-and-so, I see you have this role, I would love to chat. But there are people that do respond. When I get a message like that, I take the time to respond, I set up phone calls, and I remember the people that have spoken to me. If it's for a referral, it usually leads to a referral in the future. If it's just more of an informative coffee chat, I love to do that as well. Really, it doesn't hurt to reach out, and the worst that can happen is nobody responds, because even a no is a response and that helps you move on. The other thing is, and this almost sounds very cheesy, but believing in yourself. I know women are much less likely to apply to roles if they don't fit every single bullet point, and that's not the case. When a job posting is up, they don't expect a candidate that 100% matches everything, so truly believing and knowing how to spin your experience - like maybe you didn't necessarily manage a team, but you managed a project, and being able to articulate that. This is where the network comes in as well, of like, oh, I have this experience, do you have advice on how to massage it so that it sounds like I have this experience more than I do, but so it fits what this new employer might be looking for. Really believing in yourself and fighting the imposter syndrome as much as you can, and then being able to properly talk about your experience, because you'd be surprised how applicable your experience is to a lot of different roles.

I think some of the biggest challenges we're all very aware of is AI usage. Because we are so focused on data, I think there's some trepidation about where is this data coming from, or can I trust what I'm seeing in these data and charts. Our data is all real people taking a survey, so that's just something that people are nervous about across the board - how AI might impact jobs, roles, just the landscape of humans in general. I don't necessarily say it's a challenge because there's really great ways to utilize it as well, but I do think it's a worry and top of mind for a lot of people. On the opportunities side, there's no limit to what you can use data for when you have somebody that can show you how to use it. If a company is trying to enter a new space, we have the data to help them make those decisions or identify audiences that they may not have been able to really take a deep dive into. The big thing that gets me really excited is making data like this more accessible to folks to make better decisions for their company, their clients, their peers. That's the exciting part, because you see people's eyes light up when they see the data that we have available, and that gets everybody excited.

I think top of mind is intellectual curiosity - just asking more, just the desire to want to know more and to understand folks. It goes very far in my current role, but also, I think in life, it's just very helpful to come with an understanding ear. Another value, which I'm not necessarily sure if this is a value in itself, is treating people like people. I think oftentimes we become very intimidated by titles or asks, and I think at the end of the day it's very important to just remember people are people. That's something that I think leads a lot of my decisions and a lot of the way that I approach just interactions in general. Those are my top two, but other than that, on a fun note, I always try to find the joy in whatever I'm doing. Even if it's just like - I love working with clients, that is the joy that gets me to work every day. So that's the underbelly of it all.