 Thank you. So, yeah, disillusioned at age 50, turning a 10-year WordPress hobby into a career or as a woman who doesn't code. So, let's take a look at this a bit. It doesn't seem to be advancing. And let's try it now. I'll just operate it here. This is fine. I'll do it from right here. That works. I'm nothing if not adaptable. So, let me introduce you to myself. My name is Laura Byrne. You can find me pretty much everywhere online at New York or Laura, whether that's Twitter, WordPress.org, Slack, that is where you can find me. How did I find WordPress? I found WordPress in 2006. How many of you go back that far? All right, we're pioneers. So, I found WordPress because back then, like many of you, I had hobbies. I'm a big old nerd. If there's something fantasy or sci-fi, I'm there. Game of Thrones, Star Trek, Star Wars. You pick it. It has a horse. Some fighting, some castles. I am there. So, in the late 90s, in the early 2000s, how did you meet with other people who had the hobby you did? Well, you could be kind of limited in your local community or you went online and you found your people. Well, I went online and I found my people. In those early days, there wasn't social media. We were all engaging in websites that were built largely with things like Front Page and Dreamweaver. Anybody remember those? And then we had online forums that were easy boards or envision boards and those were clunky. Anybody remember those as well? Those Yahoo listservs and all that? Oh, yeah. So, I ended up taking, you know, part in those online communities and pursuing my passion there. So, one day, one of my friends said to me, hey, I read this book and I'd like to start a website discussion for it. Okay, great. I was like, this WordPress thing is like everywhere now. It looks so much easier than what we've been doing. She's like, yeah, do you think we could find somebody to help us build one of these things? I was like, yeah, let's ask around. We'll find someone. So, we had a blog and a discussion forum for what at the time was a brand new and little known book. Became quite a well-known book. Anybody ever heard of something called Twilight? My friend and I built the most viral Twilight website on the Internet. We thought maybe a hundred people would come by. No, it went from a hundred to a thousand to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of viewers a day from around the world visiting this website. We learned all sorts of skill sets of, this was now beyond what two people could manage. We were managing a team of 20 volunteers from around the globe. We were learning things about SEO, how to get attract people. We learned social media from the ground up and how to incorporate that into our site and how to bring more of an audience in. Then these little books ended up with movies. All of a sudden I was in the strange position of talking to movie studios and executives and how to pitch our content to them and vice versa. So all of this was fantastic. This was a hobby. This was a side thing I did for fun. And out of that hobby I ended up with some nice freelancing writing gigs in the entertainment industry, which was again great, but it wasn't really what was paying my rent. It wasn't what was putting food on the table. It was allowing me to have a little extra income. So what was my main job? My main job was in the field of education. I graduated college in 1988 with a degree in English and an electric typewriter. Computers had actual floppy disks. I mean they flopped. Like literally, they flopped. Nobody went to college with a computer when I did or maybe they were a computer science major, but that wasn't a thing. So my first career was in education, in private education as a teacher and then as an admissions director. A couple years later down the road, I transitioned my career with an education again. I became the marketing and communications director for a large system of private schools. As I used to say, there were 114 of them and one of me. It was challenging. And by 2016, I had had enough of that challenge. I was in a system where I had to commute into work every day for almost an hour in traffic in the New York metropolitan area. It's not fun. Most of my job I could have done at home, but they were going to force me to come into an office every day. And ultimately, I was stuck, pretty much capped out. I couldn't go any farther than I was. So I thought, you know, I really want to work from home. I love WordPress. What can I do? I don't know PHP. I sure don't know, let no JavaScript, let alone deeply. And I know just enough HTML and CSS to be dangerous, which is to say, you don't want me doing the CSS and the HTML. So what is it that I can do? So what I ended up doing, and we'll get to my roadmap in a minute, but I ended up transitioning my career, first starting out doing some freelance social media ads for people and realizing quickly that wasn't my passion, that wasn't where I was going to go. But I eventually transitioned into working into a small, small agency where people wore many hats. I was a project manager. I was a support ticket agent. I was, you know, pick something today. I was updating the plugins. You know, I learned a lot, and I got my feet wet. And from there, I transitioned again. Currently, I am an account manager at Web Dev Studios, which is a WordPress agency that specializes in the enterprise space. We have clients such as the NBA, the Campbell's Food Company, and Cisco Meraki to name a few. So how did I get there? Conventional wisdom would say that at age 50, good luck finding a new job. Don't quit. Hack it out. Suck it up. Stay there. Nobody wants to hire you. You're too old. Well, the fact of the matter is I'm not old. I'm experienced. I have life skills. I have life values and you need them. So I'm a pioneer. How did I learn tech? Well, I was really patient. I stood in line in Sears, because there was this game called Pong. Anybody ever play Pong? That was my first video game. We weren't hand holding a device. We were standing online at the department store waiting our turn and chatting so we could play a video game. You know, other things. I learned technology as quote unquote, the young person at work. Microsoft Office came in and everybody else had a typewriter. You know, I had to learn it and teach it to other people. That's a skill. Because of my age, my bosses are baby boomers. I speak fluent baby boomer. I am Gen X. I understand Gen X. And my child is a millennial. I speak three generations fluently. I am what you need. I relate to all of them. Here's the other thing. As a woman who doesn't code, and somebody who built an incredibly viral website, I understand user and user perspective. I have great respect for designers and development developers. But with respect, you are not users. You don't always understand their point of view. You need people like me to translate user to you and translate you back to them so you can find what these people actually want. So how did I do it? I started thinking of all of my life lessons and all the things I could do and I really quickly realized I had a laundry list this big. I had to cut it down. What were the top skills I were really good at overarching skills, not little itty bitty things. And for me, I had to pick that lane. What am I good at? I know I'm a great teacher. And with being a great teacher, I'm also a great communicator. I'm also a heck of a salesperson. So take those skills and now try to distill them into catchy sound bites because if you're competing with the job, there are a lot of people with those skills. What are how are you going to demonstrate that your skills are more memorable than somebody else's? One of the ways I did it to prove that I was really good at sales, I was in private education. I said I am selling you the benefit of education in our schools that you could get for free in the American public school system. And I am convincing you to pay $10,000 a year for that schooling. If that's not sales, I don't know what is. And I was able to do it and double admissions in school by convincing people of benefit and why you had to get them through us. So those soundbite analogies help get your point across quickly and make you memorable. How else? Like I said, websites are for people and users and you want to relate to them and I was able to do that. The other way I was able to kind of get my name out there is to constantly speak up and speak often. If there was a word camp in my area, I pitched it and I pitched a user talk. It's a talk that stands out because they have so many designer and developer talks and how many users show up at word camps and they're looking for a talk that I was giving. They were hungry for those talks and people started to recognize me. Same thing at my meetups. I was always there to say I want to talk from the user perspective and I got my name out there. It made people realize what I could bring to the table. So advice for companies and advice for those transitioning. Let me go to the, since I know I'm coming close on time, let me go to advice on the second column first. Where can you find a new job if you're somebody who doesn't code? I went to all the sponsors at word camps. I went to the flagship camps, figured out who sponsored and I started hitting up their careers pages to figure out who had a job. That's one way to do it. Another way you can find a job in the WordPress space, Michelle Frichette and that's her handle on Twitter. Every single Tuesday she posts a list of WordPress job offerings. Check it out every Tuesday. Post status is a great place to find things. Also Twitter and meetups ask around. You'll be surprised at how many people have some offerings. Also come by to Ali, she's sitting right there. Her talk is coming up today talking about how she has found a place in WordPress as somebody who doesn't code. And then advice to companies. Think about how you're representing yourself if you want more people like me. Take a look at your pages. Is there diversity on your website? And if there's not, tell me you're working on it. I'll be more encouraged to apply if I know yourself aware. If there's no salary posted, I'm not interested. Flat out I'm going somewhere else. I need to know I can feed myself and pay my rent. If you cannot put up a salary, not interested. And then just wrapping up really quickly. Take a look at your qualifications. Are you putting coding qualifications on a job that doesn't need coding? Can you teach somebody on the job? We're sponges. We can teach, we can absorb and we can transition. And then lastly, get people on your team to recruit for you. I have the job I have today because I saw somebody who is not in the HR department tweeting about we have openings. Join me. We had a Twitter conversation first and then I went to the HR department and have the job I have. So thank you for listening. It's a quick lightning talk and I'd be happy to catch up with you afterwards if you have questions.