I’m a one-woman enterprise and I get asked my story a lot. In case you’re wondering, here it is!
I attended the School of the Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University in the early ’90s (before the men’s basketball team was making waves) and graduated with a BFA in Metalsmithing and a minor in Art History in 1995. I quickly realized that the competitive world of fine arts and crafts was not going to pay my bills and ended up tumbling sidewise into Human Resources. Because that’s an obvious place for a recent art school grad, right?
Fast forward 10 years, a move to Baltimore, a husband and a kid. At that point I was getting seriously burnt out in HR. It can be a pretty thankless career. Luckily many HR Departments also house the trainers. I asked a lot of questions and weaseled my way into a few classroom gigs. After a few years of moonlighting as a trainer and classroom content developer, I started hearing more about e-learning.
I got my hands on a few rapid e-learning development programs and started teaching myself how to put together self-guided courses. Oh those early courses! Ugly and awful! But they turned a few heads and I started building a portfolio and improving my skills.I was also able to leave Human Resources for good and scored a corporate Instructional Design job, while continuing to freelance.
Several great jobs in both instructional design and instructional development have allowed me to gain an incredible set of skills, from project management to large training event coordination to video production to graphic design. Along the way, I began studying Instructional Systems Development at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and was awarded a graduate certificate in Distance Education in 2013.
Today I have freelanced for over 17 years and I can honestly say I love what I do and it’s a thrill to create educational content that people can access anywhere and anytime!
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