For about six years, I was looking for a job in tech.
Content marketing, specifically — content writer, content marketing coordinator, content marketing manager. I had lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost a decade, and I got swept up in it. Everyone around me was a content creator, an influencer, a cult of personality, or building the next big app. I wanted to be on a marketing team doing interesting experiments — figuring out how to get the message about a quality product to exactly the right people. And honestly, I needed to make a livable wage, and tech seemed like the most direct path to that.
So I searched. LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, newsletters, job trackers, AI tools. I applied for hundreds of positions, customized resumes, wrote cover letters from scratch. I did a nine-week training program on breaking into tech specifically designed for woman and marginalized people. I hired multiple job coaches. I got good feedback every time — strong resume, solid cover letters, good interview presence. In six years, I got three interviews. I rarely even got a rejection email, let alone a callback.
I still don’t know exactly why. Maybe the market is flooded. Maybe they don’t want to hire someone over 40. There are other possibilities I can’t rule out. What I know is that it didn’t work, and at some point, continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results stops being persistence and starts being something else.
Life also had other plans during those years. I moved twice, lived through a pandemic, went through a divorce, and spent a significant stretch of time dealing with personal matters that made a focused job search basically impossible. By 2022, I was back in Seattle, rebuilding, and trying to figure out what came next.
What came next, for a while, was education.
I moved near the University of Washington and started doing temp work on campus. It wasn’t a surprise that I loved it — I’d been a college speaker for years, worked at San Francisco State University for three years, and had always felt at home in the particular ecosystem of a university. Staff at universities often get tuition benefits, and I’ve always wanted to go to grad school. The work felt meaningful. The environment felt right.
But I couldn’t get traction. No interviews, no lasting contacts, and — if I’m honest — I still didn’t know what specific role I was trying to land within higher education. I loved being there. I just couldn’t figure out how to get in the door.
The pivot to events happened in a conversation with my job coach.
I was talking about what I’m actually good at — networking, connecting with people, making an impression quickly. I said something like: most people, within five minutes of talking to me, get a positive impression and think I’d be worth hiring. What I need are a few good people in my corner who are interested in helping me find the right fit.
She said: there are industries built on exactly that. Hospitality. Events. And — she pointed out — I had a lot of event experience.
I knew she was right the moment she said it.
What followed was a hyperfixation of the most productive kind. I built a web portfolio, redesigned my resume as skills-based, updated my LinkedIn, and put together a PDF of portfolio highlights. And to do all of that, I went digging — through photo archives, old hard drives, the Internet Archive, Flickr, graphic design files, documents, data, dates, promotional materials from events going back to the early 2000s.
That excavation changed something.
I knew I had event experience. What I didn’t fully understand, until I laid it all out, was how extensive it was. How far back it goes. How consistently it runs as a through-line through every chapter of my work, even the chapters I’d been labeling as something else. It had always been there. I just hadn’t been looking at it directly.
When I started looking at event job postings, I matched every skill. When I looked at the software lists, I’d used most of it. When I had informational interviews, I knew what questions to ask without doing much research first, and the research confirmed I was asking the right ones. The industry pays a living Seattle wage. It’s built on relationships and networking rather than disappearing into a job board void. And I am genuinely excited about doing more of this work: bigger events, larger budgets, longer reach, a team to build with instead of a ceiling to bump against alone.
I’m not grieving the pivot. This doesn’t feel like giving something up. It feels like finally looking at what was already there and deciding to take it seriously.
That’s where Part 2 begins.