From Teaching Kids to Tech Consulting: Jessica Parker’s Career Resilience Secrets | Ep038

Episode Information Show Notes What if moving 18 times before your 18th birthday could become your greatest career asset? In this conversation, Jessica Parker reveals how early life challenges shaped an unshakeable approach to career resilience that’s kept her employed for over three decades. Jessica’s path from aspiring computer scientist to elementary educator to tech consultant illustrates the power of strategic pivots and continuous learning. Her story challenges conventional wisdom about career planning, showing how flexibility and adaptability often trump rigid goal-setting. This Episode Covers: Strategic Career Navigation Jessica discusses her approach to building multiple skill sets across project management, quality assurance, and business analysis. She explains how diversifying capabilities creates options during uncertain times and why having “Plan B, C, and D” matters more than perfecting Plan A. The Contract Work Advantage Contrary to popular belief about job security, Jessica makes a compelling case for contract positions as career accelerators. She breaks down the mindset shifts needed to thrive as a contractor and how to leverage temporary roles for skill building and network expansion. Learning as a Core Competency With a habit of reading 300+ books annually, Jessica shares her methods for rapid knowledge acquisition and retention. The conversation explores practical note-taking strategies and how to synthesize information from multiple sources for real-world application. Professional Relationship Building From Toastmasters to industry associations, Jessica explains how authentic networking creates career opportunities. Her “volunteer mindset” approach to workplace collaboration offers a fresh perspective on getting the best from professional relationships. Career Resilience Workshop Insights Jessica developed a custom workshop on career resilience for graduate students, distilling decades of experience into actionable frameworks. She shares key principles around transferable skills, strategic planning, and maintaining employability across economic cycles. Key Takeaways: Document your work thoroughly to avoid becoming indispensable in the wrong way Build relationships before you need them, not during crisis moments Develop skills that transfer across industries and roles Embrace feedback as a gift for professional growth Consider contract work as a strategic career move, not a last resort Guest Background: Jessica Parker is a technology consultant specializing in cybersecurity and AI research. She’s currently completing her doctoral dissertation while running a consulting practice that helps small businesses solve complex technology challenges. Her career spans multiple industries including healthcare, finance, and technology, with experience in project management, quality assurance, and organizational leadership. Resources Mentioned: VitalSmarts “Crucial Conversations” series Project Management Professional (PMP) certification Toastmasters International Society for Information Management (SIM) Connect with Jessica: Find Jessica’s career resilience workshop and research publications on ResearchGate.https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-parker-pmp/ Career Downloads explores the real journeys of technology professionals, uncovering practical advice for managing your own career with greater success. Host Manuel Martinez brings you authentic conversations about the wins, challenges, and lessons learned along the way. Listen on your preferred platform: [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] | [YouTube Music] | [YouTube] Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday featuring diverse voices from the technology industry. TranscriptionManuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their career and their experiences with the goal to help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Jessica Parker. We met at a local SIM networking event. I asked her a little bit about kind of the things that she has done over time. There was a lot of interesting information in there. We’ve had a couple of follow-up conversations and I’m really excited because apart from, you know, just the different ways that she’s navigated her career, she’s also built a career workshop. She’s a Toastmaster, so there’s a lot of great details within her career that I’m excited to kind of dig into and we probably won’t get to everything, but, you know, that’s probably a good thing because maybe I can convince her to come back and we can do a part two at some point. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Jessica. Jessica: Thank you so much, Manuel. I really appreciate it. It was so much fun getting to talk to you at the SIM event. The Society for Information Management, our local Las Vegas chapter has grown so much and it’s been exciting because everybody I get to talk to there, I learned so much from them. It’s a lot of fun. Manuel: I agree and I hadn’t, this is probably only the second or third event that I had been to, but it was probably the first one where I’ve got to speak to more people and kind of learn a lot more. So, you know, I’m very excited and just like you, right? Just like you mentioned, you have the ability to learn and meet new people. So for this conversation, if you wouldn’t mind just kind of telling us where you’re currently at and what it is that you do in your current role. Jessica: Well, I often describe my role as a consultant and that’s because I am a consultant. I do a lot with understanding data, understanding what’s going on behind the scenes. I do a lot with cybersecurity and AI in my doctoral research because I’m oh so close to finishing up my doctorate. I’m doing the research this semester and hope to defend in the fall. I’m planning to defend in the fall. I got to be positive about this, you see. Determine, I will defend this fall sometime between September and December, and then I will have finally earned my doctorate, which is pretty exciting. And that doctoral thesis is focused on the intersection of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, which is where I get to dig into all of that. I do consulting work where I’m helping small businesses figure out their technology solutions. I’m working with one entrepreneur right now, looking to migrate their site from a solution that was built in 2001. Their developer’s in China and the developer’s ready to move on. It’s time to find somebody new. They don’t have a lot of technology folks in their networks. Reached out to me because my sister’s also involved in the project, so it’s kind of fun. Manuel: That’s amazing. And it’s interesting, you know, just being able to help out in different areas and how you kind of connect with people, right? Like you mentioned, that was your sister that’s involved with it. She brings you in, and I think that’s a theme that I’ve seen through a lot of these different conversations. So now, if you can tell us a little bit about where you grew up, again, we don’t have to go into a lot of detail, but just kind of summarize it for us, and then eventually what your path looked like as, you know, we don’t have to go straight into where you got into technology, but kind of what sparked that interest, or, you know, some people it’s early in their career or in life, and some people it’s not until later on, and they just accidentally fell into it. So I’m very curious to learn more. Jessica: It was definitely not straight. (both laughing) Anything but straight, circuitous, probably. When I grew up, my mother and I moved quite a bit. We moved less frequently once she remarried, but I did the math. By the time I was 18 years old, I moved an average of once a year. I moved 18 times by the time I was 18 years old. That flexibility that comes with that moving frequently is an asset, the one drawback, well, there’s several other drawbacks, but one of the key drawbacks is you don’t have like that same group of friends that you build deep relationships with during your childhood. So people I knew in kindergarten, aside from family, I don’t know them now, because I never saw them again after that. People I knew from first and second grade, never saw them again after that. Third grade, oh, that was fun. I got to go to two schools. I was really mad because we moved from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the school year ended in May, to Southern California, where the school year ended about a month later. I was, you know, and for a third grade kid, you’re just mad, what do you mean I have to go to more school? I could have been done. It’s those little things that make you mad as a small child. As an adult, you have more perspective. Over time, we did end up staying enough in the same area that I got to build a little bit more depth of friendship through high school. My high school happened to offer a computer class. This was the eighties, just for context. I’m not shy about my age. I got to take BASIC programming, as we took BASIC programming on an Apple IIe that had less memory than my cell phone does now, we could take apart the computer. So it had basically a lid on top that you could just pop off, and you could see all the circuits. So our computer instructor not only taught us how to program in BASIC, but also how the circuit boards were connected and how everything worked. I was super excited for around my 16th birthday to get my very first computer, an Apple IIe with a double disk drive. You know, the bi...