Brianna Philippi

I think I've always had that drive to be the best that I can be. If I finish my day feeling like I've helped one person, then I can go on and keep doing that to the next day. That's kind of always been my drive - have I helped somebody that day? In my previous roles, I liked to latch on to somebody that has expressed interest in pursuing something and helping them. I mean, I've had direct employees that were interested in pursuing a leadership role, and now they're running a portion of the building because we worked together and we got there. So I think that's what drives me, is have I helped somebody that day? And then there's also my personal drive - I always want to be learning and continuously improving. If I feel stagnant, then I want to try to find something that I can work on and improve.

I had a colleague earlier in my career - we were both yard marshals at Amazon, working with truck drivers and making sure they were going in the right spots. She was a little bit older than me, and I was talking to her about what I wanted to do with my life, not really knowing what direction I wanted to go in. I just knew that I love working with people and leading them, and I was looking into that space, but I wasn't qualified. I was talking to her about all these jobs I was seeing but not being qualified for them. She told me, as long as you fit at least 3 of those requirements, go ahead and throw your hat in the ring. She said the worst thing that happens is you don't get the job, and best case scenario, somebody gives you an opportunity and you can prove to them that those couple extra bullet points aren't going to be the end of the world. So I think that was great advice I got from her - worst case scenario, you don't get it, but as long as you meet like three of those requirements, go ahead and try. Submit it.

I think there are a lot of opportunities that are available, but there isn't always a lot of communication on them. So my advice would be to build those networking relationships early on in your career, so that the people that know those resources you already have a connection with. That's helped me a lot. Now I'm searching for a job, and I've reached out to my network, so building up a network early on in a career - I think that's my biggest advice.

In my field, we were working with a lot of third-party contractors and upstream partners, downstream partners, and I think a lot of the challenges were misses in communication. There are a lot of opportunities to improve processes to make it more streamlined and more efficient with better tracking. Some of the opportunities, I think, would be streamlining communication. And some of the challenges is that there's always a drive to improve, and so sometimes you have to think outside of the box, or just forget the box 100% and think of something else to try to achieve a goal.