Welcome to Girl on Wire’s 25th blog! I’m often asked how I got into the telecommunications industry. My answer? It’s been a long and windy road 🙂
The photo here is actually me at the oh-so-young age of 16. I was on a family trip and we stopped by Universal Studios in California to take their tour. They had props set up from the movie “The incredible Shrinking Woman” and my parents thought it would be hilarious to take photos of me and my siblings posing with these larger-than-life everyday items. I was told to climb onto the giant phone.
I recently asked my parents why they chose this prop for me; did they have some sort of vision that I’d work in telecom one day? They both laughed, “You were a teenager who was always on the phone, we just had to have a photograph of you on the phone!”
So what is the path one takes to get where I am today? In high school, my aspiration was to be an attorney. I studied Political Science at Loyola University in Baltimore, but halfway through my senior year, I realized law school was not going to happen.
I shifted gears and decided to attend paralegal school after graduation, where I earned a certificate in Litigation Management. I worked as a paralegal for the next eight years.
After leaving the legal field, I found a job at a reprint company. We handled reprint orders for approximately 600 different magazines and my job was to support a sales team. I learned a lot about sales and the printing industry.
Five years into that, the company was hit with a copyright infringement suit for reprinting a photograph without securing copyright. A new role in the company was created and I was promoted to Director of Rights and Permissions.
Due to a drastic dip in print sales, I was laid off a few years later. I was ready for a change and decided to move to Baltimore, MD., but finding a job here while living in Pennsylvania was a challenge.
Sending our resumes was not enough, so I attended every networking event in Baltimore I could find and that’s how I met Chris. I was not looking to work in telecom, but after talking to him, I knew that Teltek was where I wanted to be.
I started working at Teltek in March of 2010 and it’s been quite the ride! I helped establish our Baltimore office, hire a sales force, move us into the ETC and went from there into handling service calls. I recently took on the new role of Director of Women in Business and will be using that position to establish relationships with other female-managed businesses and locate government work when our WBE status is finalized.
So, in a few paragraphs, that’s how I got here.
Don’t ever be afraid of where the path takes you, it will twist again soon enough. Very few people these days have jobs in the field they started in, it’s all part of the personal evolution process. If you are interested in evolving your career by working at Teltek, send your resume to careers@myteltek.com and tell us the story of how you arrived at this point!