You are techY podcast

Ellen

You are listening to the You are techY podcast, episode number 162.

Voiceover

Welcome to the, You are techY podcast where it’s all about growing in your techy-ness. So you can find the tech job of your dreams. And now your host technology learning coach Ellen Twomey.

Ellen

Hey moms, are you trying to break into tech? Are you wondering what skills you really need to get hired and how those skills can be worth $45 an hour? Not that $25 an hour you thought when you first started thinking about going back to work? If so, then the You are techY membership is for you. Our combination of courses, coaching and community, come with a mentor support. You need to keep moving forward into your tech career. It’s like no other membership available. We have the exact skills employers are looking for. You learn how to maximize your income with portfolio ready skills that hiring managers are seeking, not to mention the steps you can skip. So you don’t find yourself down that endless tech learning rabbit hole. Join me as we walk you step-by-step through the getting hired process in tech. Sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y O U A R E T E C H Y.com. I can’t wait to see you in our membership.

Ellen

We’ve got a great encore episode planning for you today. We are revisiting episode 141 Success Story with Jocelyn Buckley. I love this episode. Jocelyn is a fantastic example of what you can do when you are willing to be brave and do things that scare you to communicate your value.  when you have fantastic skills as Jocelyn does.

Ellen

This is a fantastic repeat episode. So, I really hope you enjoy the encore. Take notes. Jocelyn is fantastic at taking notes on things that she on herself and things that she didn’t like that she did, and then, and bringing it to coaching and saying, here’s how I wanna level up. It’s super impressive.

Ellen

I know you’ll learn a lot from Jocelyn Buckley. Thanks.

Ellen

Jocelyn Buckley is a marketing Maven and finance guru turned UX and web designer. She’s a You are techY alum as well as a graduate of Tulane University, where she studied management, consumer behavior, marketing and music, including vocal performance. So let’s see if we can get her to sing. Jocelyn is originally from Atlanta and now calls Brooklyn home. She’s definitely up the cool vibe with her legendary creative designs in her artistic flare. She’s just coming off the heels of a trip to Ireland. And I can’t wait to hear more about it. Jocelyn, welcome to the show.

Jocelyn

Hi, thank you. So happy to be here.

Ellen

How was your trip? How was Ireland?

Jocelyn

Oh, it was really fun. My sister and I went for a friend’s wedding and my parents ended up joining us also, which was really nice since we are very distantly related to some other Buckleys there.

Jocelyn

So we made it like an ancestral journey was like really fun. So fun was not brave enough to kiss the Barney stone, but my 75 year old father did <laugh> I was very impressed. <laugh> wow.

Jocelyn

Well, what do you have to lose, you know.

Ellen

That’s a good way to look at it. Was it so beautiful though? I’ve heard Ireland, like it’s just green for miles. 

Jocelyn:
It is. It’s actually the Emerald Isle. Like I didn’t realize it was gonna be so pretty. Yeah. Gorgeous.

Ellen

That’s awesome. Anything else of note?

Jocelyn

No, I guess I say, if you have the chance to go, definitely go for it. Everyone’s really friendly. Food’s pretty good. Oh yeah. The people I’ve heard are like, thank for welcoming. That’s what my parents said when they went. I definitely wanna take my mother-in-law. We wanna go cuz the, to me name it’s very, it’s very Irish, right?

Ellen

We that’s the T w O that’s the, the original, they didn’t change it. Where many people, when they came over changed the name. So we’ll have we saw me on all sorts of different establishments as looking of you. Oh, fun. That was super fun. All right. So let’s talk about let’s shift. I think we should talk about tech, what do you think? Sounds good. So in your own words, why did you wanna break into that? 

Jocelyn:
Well, for me, and I feel like for probably a lot of people who found their way to UX, it wasn’t a clear goal of mine. It was a really circuitous route. I don’t know if you gathered that by my whole majors for college, but <laugh>, I never knew exactly what I wanted to do. You know, people were always saying, why are you pursuing music in business? But the truth is I was interested in both and I feel like UX is a great example of a combination of sort of strategic thinking and a more creative outlet.

Jocelyn

So for me, it really, it worked out to, to just keep on looking for a path that felt right. But when I first was out of college, I worked for a couple of startups and I wasn’t sure like what I envisioned for my career, but I was putting like feelers out, trying to identify a department that I really liked, but it really became fair when I listened to this podcast called How I Built This with Guy Roz and he was interviewing Sal Kahn who founded the Khan academy. So Sal Kahn was describing how he built the Khan academy. And one of the things he said was his very first hire was a user experience designer. And I just thought like, that’s so cool. I wanna be the person who’s helping people with these grand visions, like actually build it out and make it a real experience that people can interact with and, you know, put it out there in the world.

Ellen

I love that. And I love Sal Kahn. We just listened to Khan Academy in the last week. My son is at a new school and he has these really cool math assignments. And one of them, just one problem of long division. And he had never learned long division. And I explained it to him. You know, I have a very strong math background. I’ve tutored many people. I pride myself in my math tutoring. And so I taught him, but then we listened to Sal and it was like, just the way that he does it. My son was like, I got it. I got it. No, I wanna do four more to practice. And if you knew, I said like that, I was like, I love it. It’s so great. And I talk about Khan academy too, like it’s for children, but they have a lot of coding challenges.

Ellen

I think that it’s a great user experience. And so sorry, I just love Sal Kahn and I love what you said about wanting to help create these grand visions. That’s what drew you to it because it is such an important thing that he’s doing in the world. And so it’s so cool to be a part of that and to think about that aspect of it.

Jocelyn: 

Oh yeah. I mean, that’s great. You use Khan academy. It’s such a cool resource, but yeah, I think that’s definitely what drew me. It’s like, I wanna have a skill. That’s helping people like tangibly. And for me it’s, it felt like a perfect path to do that. So that’s how I chose it as like something I wanted to pursue, but it took many years for me to actually get to the point where I’m, I feel like I’m doing it.

Ellen

Okay. <laugh>, that’s so funny that you say it like that because of course that’s not my perspective. All my perspective is like you have done it so quickly, but right. Cause everyone, I meet everyone in different parts of their journey, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what do you like most about UX design? 

Jocelyn:
I mean, there’s so much about it that I really love. Like I’ve been thinking about what do I love most about the whole process and there’s just parts of every bit of it that I enjoy, but definitely the problem solving, like being able to work with a business and sort of understand the business goals. And after working for many years in customer service and customer support position, where I can feel like I can bring those two really important needs together and find a solution that works for everybody is just really satisfying.

Jocelyn

But I also like looking back, it feels so clear to me that this is something I should be pursuing. Cuz one of the hobbies that I had growing up was actually scrapbooking. So like me and my friends in high school, we would just like have days where we would spend all day like putting on our photos and like pulling in different papers with different textures and using different fonts to represents like a weekend, you know? And so I’m like, oh, that’s just the tangible version of building a web interface. The line is so clear to me, but it all makes sense now. Yeah. Now it does exactly. 

Ellen: 

But I love too what you said. I just wanna go back a little bit when you were saying that people were confused about business and music and what your response was. I just was interested in those and I think that’s such an interesting point because it really is not a big leap.

Ellen

You know, there are lots of ways to approach UX design and okay, fine. We’re not always singing. Although I usually am, when I’m doing, I love singing. I sing all the time. We do lots of dance parties and karaoke. Those. 

Jocelyn: 

Yeah. So although, although singing is not a requirement in UX design, it is a creative outlet. And that, I think that it makes sense now, like, Hey, I’m a UX designer. I studied this creative pursuit with business and what do you know? I’m doing something like that. Now I feel like that also seems to line up even though other people didn’t get it. What do you think? Definitely I’m. I mean, I never have regretted learning about both of those areas in education, but definitely singing, I think, or being a part of a musical ensemble has really laid the way for really harmonious to make fun collaboration.

Jocelyn

Like it’s like when you’re a musician, you are just singing one part in a choir or in a band and everyone is bringing their own like skill sets to the table. And it’s all about like, how are we gonna sound together? Like what are we working on together? And after working in business, I find that that’s like kind of an interesting approach. A lot of times I have had some colleagues who come across as like a little competitive it’s like you are proprietary about what you’re bringing to the table and you don’t wanna share and make the whole team better. Not in every case, just like one, you know, a couple of times I’ve noticed, I’m like, oh, that’s so different than how I would try to do it. It’s like when you have something you can share and make everybody better. So just like not having that competitiveness, I think it’s like being more focused about collaboration and what can we all create together for sure.

Ellen

Oh, that’s super interesting. Yeah. I love that. So I’m a big time athlete, love competition, but I think it’s really ineffective when a team competes with each other, you know, you have to work together. So where you see it as an ensemble, you know, I definitely see like a product team is as a team and if we’re rowing in different directions, that’s gonna be really effective. And I have had environments where that was happening and I absolutely hated it. It just didn’t feel natural to me. Right. Like what are we gonna get accomplished if we’re like fighting against each other? <laugh> you know? Right. Yeah. Can’t do that. Right. Some people really view it that way, but I agree the better teams I think are, are working together. And that’s so cool that you had that experience with that ensemble because even though my background is different, I feel like that makes a lot of sense to me, the way that you’re describing it.

Ellen

You’re also making me realize I never really was on too many teams. So I’ve like I played tennis, which is very individual sports. So it makes sense that the part that stands out to me is the competitive nature. So I’m glad to hear that you had a similar experience working with a team. Sounds very encouraging. That’s great. And I love that you played tennis. I want my son to play tennis, but he’s refusing. So maybe you can have a conversation with him. It’s not the Kahn Academy son. It’s my older one. Okay. We’ll move on to you. It’s more interesting. <laugh> so you did talk a little bit about kind of the length of time that it took you to get into it. Even though, again, from my perspective, you did it quickly, but what was your greatest struggle when you were transitioning into tech and maybe even touch upon if it was ever on your radar when you were growing up?

Ellen

Now, looking back, you mentioned scrapbooking, but you can touch on those two things. 

Jocelyn: 

Oh, sure. Yeah. I would say that tech was never really on my radar, even now. I still feel like it’s just the method that I’m doing, the problem solving through. It’s not like I feel super technologically advanced notorious for being late to adopt a new device. Like my iPhone is working then great. Like I’ll, you know, I’ll hang onto it for as long as I can. So it was never a passionate of mind to have like the latest, greatest thing tech wasn’t really on my radar in that way. But as far as what was the biggest struggle and why did it take me so long is the way that I see it, it’s just, you know, it’s really scary embarking on something where there’s no certain outcome transitioning into a new career meant taking effort that could be spent elsewhere towards my existing careers or, you know, towards hanging out with friends and family.

Ellen

You know, it’s a sacrifice when you are splitting your time between doing, you know, meeting your needs for the existing life that you have, and also, you know, taken away from that and putting it towards pursuing something that is worthwhile is like maybe more rewarding, but it’s a choice. And it’s really hard to do that because it does take a lot of time and energy and effort. And so I was kind of for many years I was doing both, but if you’re just doing it at the end of the day or on the weekends, it’s really easy to get burnt out because it, it can take a long time. So just making the choice to, to commit to it and to keep putting in the effort. And I think realizing that it’s not gonna be these like weekend bursts that, you know, like a hackathon here and there that really make the difference for me.

Jocelyn

It’s like consistently putting in a little bit of time and making sure to do that on a regular basis and seeing it more as like a process, a practice, I feel like those sort of shifts in how I was putting an effort, made a difference. 

Ellen: 

Oh my gosh, that’s so good. I love it. I think that is so brilliant. So I’m gonna shift here a little bit because you know, you just kept doing it. And since I was present, as you transitioned into your freelance work and you know, really becoming a UX designer who has paid for her professional expertise, seeing that transition, I mean, I guess maybe talk a little bit about that because from my perspective, as your coach and mentor, it kind of felt like you just kept doing the same thing and then now you get paid for it. Like you show up and talk a little bit about that transition from your perspective, even though I know you overcame hard things for it, but talk a little bit about that transition, just doing the work and how is it different now that you’re paid versus, you know, putting in the time to learn the skills.

Jocelyn

Yeah. I definitely hear what you’re saying. And I agree with that. It feels like, you know, kind of like you said, you’re doing the same thing and all of a sudden you are getting paid for it. You’re getting the reward for it. And it’s really exciting. But I was thinking about this just yesterday. It’s like, wow, the things that I’m doing so easily now, it was so hard when I first started like just learning a certain plug-in application was like, it took me a few hours. And I remember thinking like, it was just the fact that I was committed to putting in a little bit of time every day to actually feel comfortable using it. And now it just it’s like second nature. So you just don’t notice when it’s, when the tides are shifting and all of a sudden you’re in another area and you’re looking back thinking, oh wow, like come a long way.

Ellen

Yeah. Right, right. 

Ellen: 

But I wanted to say that, you know, I really credit your program, the You are techY program with helping me to get to that point, huge debt of gratitude for you specifically, because you know, I had done different programs in the past and I identified like, what was missing for me really was having that crucial feedback from a mentor and from someone who was, you know, had been in the industry and could give me real guidance in a meaningful way. And like being able to develop a relationship with you and trust your opinion was so important because it’s like, you can send off your cover letter into the author and not get feedback and never know if your efforts are like going and chasing like the right direction. So just having theYou are techY program and going to hot seat coaching every week and seeing what other women are, are working with and, you know, hearing about their struggles, it’s just such a, a welcoming community.

Jocelyn

And I feel like that is really rare that everyone is there helping each other. So it’s not just you giving good advice. It’s like the other ladies in the program. And it’s just, that was exactly what I needed to like have the courage to take the next steps that got me to where I am. It was having that kind of environment. And knowing that I had the support of you and all the other members to fall back on it was great. 

Ellen

Thank you. I’m embarrassed. That’s right. Say, I mean, it really is helpful when you’re showing up every day to be doing it with other people and then to be getting feedback when you go with skew and then to be believing in yourself when you are making great choices and you are, you know, making the progress. I think that, you know, I remember I had Derek Sims on like, he was like podcast 30.

Ellen

He mentioned Jennifer Dewald, who was a later podcast guest. And basically what she did, which is so bold. And she’s an amazing entrepreneur now, but she did this 30 days of code and she, maybe it was a hundred and she just showed up every day. Okay. Like, did not know any code she’s like today, I’m starting a hundred days of code and I’m gonna show up for a hundred days and write code. And she took people on her journey. And I mean, that’s so bold, right? Because you don’t know what the heck you’re doing and she’s gonna like produce something every day. And I wish all of us could be that bold, but the reality is like, whatever it takes to get you to show up every day is the important piece. And you know, don’t take that too. Literally we people take vacation, Jocelyn comes to Ireland.

Ellen

Like it, it happens, right. The point is like, just showing up consistently, like you were talking about is the key. What we’ve designed the program around is like, Hey, if we have the right community and we understand that when something is hard, that’s not a reason to stop. There’s nothing wrong with us, that consistency, whatever it takes, I love our program. You should ever want to join, but whatever you’re doing out there listening, if you do it consistently and you do it, even when it’s hard, I love what you said about the plugin. Like what took you hours now probably takes you minutes because you’re no longer doing it for the first time. So I would love to know you have a background in two things that I’ve talked about a lot being great influences in UX, but I don’t want that to anchor you just from your full transparency, you spent quite a bit of time in marketing and customer service roles.

Ellen

Do you think that helped prepare you for UX or not really? Or what is your perspective on it?

Jocelyn
Absolutely like 100%. And I would say that in, in different ways with marketing, it was more about like the analytics of things is where you’re spending your time and where you’re putting your effort is that actually yielding a return. So being able to do, you know, measurements and understand the KPIs and performance of your pages is really crucial. Cuz if you’re not meeting the business needs, then unfortunately like maybe the project isn’t succeeding. So you need to keep that in mind when you’re creating these pages and creating the experience for people. So having that as a background was really helpful. And I also feel like it’s been really helpful for me as someone who may be naturally veers towards like the support roles, the customer advocacy, being able to translate, we need to do this, to help the customers into like numbers into metrics and hand that off to a marketing department or an engineering department.

Jocelyn

That’s the language that they’re speaking often. And so that’s when you’re gonna move the needle on being a good customer advocate is being able to say, we need to give a better experience to the customers because it’s actually, you can see here, we’re losing 3% of sales when these clothes come in or whatever. And then they’ll be like, I see why that’s important now. You know, so being able to translate into qualitative data has really been helpful for me. And then as far as has customer service prepared me a hundred percent because what’s with being able to relate to the customers and really hear their stories. I think that’s like the ultimate goal of a good user experience, right? It’s like keeping your audience in mind. And so just being able to hear from them, like straight from their mouths about what has been going on for their experience with the company and for their experience with the site or the app, it’s crucial.

Jocelyn

And it’s also, it’s prepared me for being able to sort of like capture user data in a really easy way. It’s like can connect with people and then understand what has been going well or what has been going not so well and translate that into information that you can use to build a better experience. 

Ellen: 

Yeah, I think that’s so great. I think from a general standpoint, people pretty much get like, Hey, if you’re dealing with the customers, it’s gonna impact the users early on in my career, I worked with another podcast guest. I don’t know why I’m talking about so many podcast guests, but Katelin Meyer. And so she was like, I would say like my one of my first mentees and she worked in customer service and I trained her in UX. And so I was able to see when I was doing that is how much insight she had into the customer.

Ellen

She’s like, no, no, we have to write it like this because they’re struggling with it here. And so it was this really visceral experience that Kaitlin spending time literally on the phones could create messaging and UX that was just cut to the heart. It was like we had our user research right there because she knew so intimately. So I think that it can be a really strong background, but if you don’t have that background, I think that UX should be collaborating with customer service because it can just shorten that timeframe. 

Jocelyn: 

Right. You can solve customer service issues in UX. So it’s really yeah. Impactful. And, and I will say like, so I worked as a customer insights person at Rent the Runway for a while. And I feel like that was a really formative experience for me because it was a new startup.

Jocelyn

But being in that environment where it felt like the sort of CEO for sure, and the top executives understood the relationship that us on CI were building with the clients was so crucial. And so I feel really lucky to have worked at a company where they also value like the customer support that’s being given and they value the team. And so having those channels open where my team felt very capable and encouraged to share what was going on with us, like every week we had meetings with the development team and with the marketing team to pass on those insights. So it’s like we were taking the notes, but they were getting the feedback. So it wasn’t like siloed at all. And I feel like that really comes across in the experience and you know, the direction that the company has taken is because they have such a close loyalty, a close, like relationship with their customers through the CI team.

Jocelyn

You know, I recommend that approach to everyone because I, I don’t see the benefit of like keeping those areas separate. 

Ellen: 

Right. And just like you said, it’s great to have user experience team members go to the customer support teams as well, because then, you know, in UX we’re always looking for testers and often in customer service, you’re actually speaking with people, you have a direct line already. Like that’s a pool of like a vocal people. So that’s great. That’s a, that was a great example. I love it. Okay. I’m really interested to ask you this next question. Cause I feel like you’ve hinted at some of this, so it might just be a different answer, but how do you view your role in technology as a woman in technology?

Jocelyn:

 Well, like I said, I, it never was drawn to tech. So you just like hearing you say that is even like, oh, I’m in tech.

Ellen

<laugh> you’re like, wait, am I in tech? 

Jocelyn: 

Yeah, <laugh> I love it. But I think, I guess my role is that I feel like I wouldn’t be where I am today and you know, where wherever I’ll be without the support and the help of friends and other women, I feel like my role is really to help other people in their struggle to overcoming the, the obstacles that I can relate to. And I struggled with, with myself, you know, a lot of it is feeling intimidated by the tech world in general. And so just being there to provide tips or training or send along a job that might suit them, you know, it’s just like keeping my eye out to help other women overcome the sort of stigma, stigmas getting into tech and the struggles that come with it. I love it. That was beautiful. Yeah.

Ellen

Okay. So what advice would you give to a woman who’s considering tech, especially someone who is really thinking, you know, they don’t, they never really saw themselves in it and maybe they’re interested in UX design, but the thought of being, thinking about being in tech is like they don’t associate that identity with it. So what advice would you give to someone who’s kind of on that really, you know, journey? Well, I guess I, two things kind of come to mind the first is that it’s an overwhelming transition. So like when there’s everything to learn and there’s no limit to what you can learn in any one direction, it can feel extremely overwhelming. So one of the first things that I, that I would recommend is I just have this spreadsheet in Google where every time I encounter something that I think like, oh, I wanna learn more about that.

Jocelyn

I’ll just take an article and I’ll drop it into my spreadsheet. And then I’ll sort of catalog it and I’ll have this like database of information that I can go back to when I actually have time to read it. So it’s like, it won’t distract me if I drop a link into this catalog. And then I have the freedom of learning about it when I actually have the time. So I found that that really helped me sort of stay out of the rabbit hole and just move on. And that can be really hard to not fall into as you call it kind of the overwhelming rabbit hole. 

Ellen: 

I love that idea. It’s a brilliant idea truly. 

Jocelyn:
And then the other thing that comes to mind is just to keep at it because it can be overwhelming. And, you know, we talked earlier about setting consistent habits, but I just, I have this, I’m looking at it right now, this picture of a bike. And so at some point I heard someone say, just like, you know, keep pedaling the bike, like stay up, don’t stop pedalling and fall over. So just make sure that you’re consistently putting in that effort and, you know, just keep at it. 

Ellen
<laugh> that is great advice. Jolyn this was so much fun. I think you provided just a great, authentic picture of what the journey can be like. And I’m just so grateful for your thoughts. And I know my audience will be too.

Jocelyn:
Thank you so much. 

Ellen: 

Thank you.

Ellen

Hey if you enjoyed listening to this podcast you have to sign up for the You are techY email list. Imagine being in the tech job of your dreams. Join me to get the strategies training and never-ending support to get hired. Sign up at youaretechy.com. That’s Y O U A R E T E C H Y.com. I’ll see you next time.