Tori S Golden

The best career advice I've ever received is never stop learning. I received that when I was in high school by someone who was my mentor. When you hear that when you're young, you're kind of like, well, duh, everything is new to me and you're forced to learn all the time. But as you get older, you get into this pattern of doing what you know, which then, inevitably, you stop learning new things because you're just doing what you know and time is going by. But if you stop learning, then maybe you need to pivot. I see my peers starting to have these conversations of, can I career pivot? Is it too late? And we're only in our 30s. That was the best advice because when you need to pivot, it also mandates that you have to learn something new. You can't be so fearful to learn something new, especially as you get older, because it can hold you back. For example, if you get laid off from your government job that you've been in for 20 years, you don't know how to utilize LinkedIn. They've heard about this LinkedIn thing, but they've never had to use it.

The advice I would give to young women entering into my field would be to find yourself useful. You must be useful. When it comes down to any type of career, your stability in either the job that you have or your ability to secure another job is you knowing how you can make yourself useful, because you have to be a problem solver. If you're applying for a job, it's because they have a job that needs to be done, and you have to be able to show that your skills are useful in solving that problem. Otherwise, job security becomes questionable, because if someone else can do your job better than you can, well, then you're not useful. So if you're finding yourself useful, being critical of the job that you're doing, then it means that blind spots of your job, you'll be the one to be able to cover it. And when they need help, they'll say, oh, go and talk to them, she's useful, I can tell you how to fix it.

I think that with district government, the biggest challenge and opportunity is being creative about solving issues of the public that may have never existed before. We have technology, we have AI, we have all of these things that present new challenges and require new thoughts and ideas about how to handle them because they've never existed before, especially when it comes down to the area of work that I work in. You have AI that now has the ability to impact weaponry. This is all stuff that impacts how you're going to keep a community safe, different than social media made a change with how communication happened between the generations, between rival gangs, neighborhoods, etc. A lot of things change with technology, with new inventions. Another area of opportunity is engaging with those that may be outside of your generation so that you can impact change there as well. You can't not know. You gotta know what's the newest app, what everybody is doing, where do people like to hang out nowadays, what do they consider fun. When you're in those places and spaces, then you're able to better navigate. But if you hear there's supposed to be this meetup going on but no one knows where it's at, you don't even know the first place to look if you're not aware of what's going on in the young folks community.