Beth Jendro Noel

I attribute my success to having strong mentors who believed in me and opened doors early in my career. I had a mentor from my early days at Leslie University who was really critical in helping me identify that I have a seat at the table. He was a colleague of mine who had more access to senior leadership than I did, and he created a dotted line from me to him that made it possible for me to take on new projects and learn new skills because he was advocating for me. As a female employee, it's just not common that you get a respected male at your business who is willing to put their neck out there and really give you the opportunities. That was over 20 years ago, and we've come back together and connected again - he's a consultant himself now, and I was able to reconnect with him and bring him to my institution to help me do some work here. Having somebody who's willing to be a mentor and do that for you for basically life at this point is pretty special. Beyond mentorship, I've also found success through being passionate about education and sharing what I know with others. My husband came to see me present at a conference and was blown away - he said he'd never seen me like that before, so happy and passionate, with people scrambling to talk to me after. Being able to take what I learned and share it with someone else, and maybe make their working experience better or help the people they serve be more supported because of something I presented on - that's what drives me.

The best career advice I’ve received came early in my professional journey: seek out mentors who not only provide guidance, but actively create opportunities for growth. I credit a former colleague at Lesley University as a key mentor who opened doors for me by connecting me to meaningful projects, expanding my network, and encouraging me to step into new challenges with confidence. That experience shaped my understanding that career advancement is not solely about individual effort, but also about relationships, trust, and the willingness of others to invest in your potential. It continues to influence my leadership approach today, as I prioritize mentoring others, creating pathways for growth, and fostering an environment where individuals feel supported in developing their skills and pursuing new opportunities.

I have a lot of younger women and people who identify as female that work with me or for me, and I've hired a few recent graduates from our school. When I'm working with them, I impress upon them the importance of being brave and trusting in their gut. It's often the case that young female employees are sitting at the end of the table, or in the other room, or their skill set isn't necessarily valued in the same way. My advice is to be persistent and be brave. Don't be afraid to talk to whoever at your institution is going to be willing to listen and support you. Make as many connections as you can in your place of employment, and just be persistent. Keep showing up, keep advocating for yourself, and don't let anyone make you feel like you don't belong at the table.

The opportunities that exist for marketers in the community college space really come down to flexibility. Community colleges are really good at being flexible to meet the needs of their communities - that's their function. Does the community need more machinists? Does the community need more nurses? How can we adjust our programming to get more graduates to complete and out in the workforce faster? That type of flexible thinking from a community college really makes being a marketer exciting in that space, because there's less of 'well, we've always done it this way,' and it's more 'alright, how do we solve this problem?' To me, marketing and communication is really problem solving - there's information that people need to know, so let's figure out how to get that to them in the best way possible. Being at a community college is a great place to be because there's continual changes and opportunities to really stretch oneself and find really different and interesting solutions. The big challenge right now is the federal government. The dismantling of the Department of Higher Ed and the lack of clarity around expectations for higher ed institutions, the changes that are coming to accreditation from the federal government - they're all making it much harder to do the work because funding is going away and new potential executive orders are coming out banning certain words or certain types of work. That's made it hard, for sure, especially at the community college level. When you have a group of students on your campus that are sheltering in place because ICE is outside, that makes it hard to do your job. How do you communicate to that community that this is still a safe place for you, even though we have had ICE camped out across the street from the college for two weeks? One of my colleagues in Illinois - this was their reality. So that's one of the challenges - doing this work at a time when things are just so confusing at the federal level.

The values most important to me are equity, inclusion, accessibility, and community. In the last six years, I've really focused my personal work and the work of my team around equity and inclusion. This area is particularly important for community colleges - my institution serves a predominantly underserved population, where more of our students identify as not white than identify as white. When I started at this institution with an all-white team, I realized early on that wasn't going to be very helpful to actually tell authentic stories, so we needed different perspectives. The work around equity and inclusion, making sure that we are using multiple lenses and involving all stakeholders into the communication solution process, is the most fulfilling to me. A huge piece of this has been creating accessible communications for neurodivergent folks. Community colleges are open access, so we get the kids who struggled in high school or the adults who didn't think they were smart enough because maybe they had dyslexia or were dealing with PTSD. I've worked with my team and the entire institution to create a process and a set of rules for how to communicate in a way that neurodivergent folks find useful. This work is deeply personal to me - my own child, an A student at a very good college right now, could not handle the application process during her senior year because the communications were not written for someone neurodivergent. I've lectured around the country trying to talk to other college marketers about how these neurodifferences are not deficits, and there are ways we can change how we write and lay out our copy so students can use their strengths. Having a neurodivergent child changes one's thinking, and I also learned my 78-year-old mother was diagnosed with ADHD, which helped me understand our family better. It's been a labor of love.