After spending four years driving growth as a marketing manager at Uber, Shanah Gaskill (Owen, ‘20) went to Vanderbilt in hopes of transition into a career in Human Resources. During her time at Vanderbilt, she found the curriculum and resources exactly what she needed to make the move to a career in HR. In our interview, she shared her thoughts on making a career transition, and how an MBA from Vanderbilt is helping her build her future career.
MBASchooled: What did you do before business school, and why did you choose to go to business school?
Prior to business school, I was a Senior Marketing Manager at Uber. I came to a fork in my career where my day-to-day responsibilities were within the marketing organization, but I was becoming increasingly involved with projects in the people side of the organization. Through a few projects that focused on employee experience, I realized my professional passions were within the people side of the business. Because of this realization, I pursued my MBA to help launch my career switch from away marketing in to HR.
MBASchooled: How did you identify what you wanted to recruit for? What led you to pursue HR?
Going into school, I knew I wanted to switch my career away from marketing and in to HR; I also knew I wanted to stay within tech. Knowing these two things, I pursued tech companies that had HR MBA internships posted.
MBASchooled: What was your summer internship, and what projects/experiences did you work on during your internship?
I was a Project Management Intern for Twitter on the Global Talent Management team. I was helping the team think through how to engage the global workforce through intentional, meaningful, and strategic programming.
MBASchooled: What skills from your past experience in marketing are relevant working in HR? What are new skills you’ve had to develop?
As a marketing professional, I was often tasked with thinking about the customer experience. For example, our team would think about how users interact with the app, how they engage with content we were creating, how to effectively communicate relevant information, etc.—a lot of our work was focused around the user experience.
With my HR internship, I was thinking of extremely similar things, the audience has just shifted. Instead of thinking about an external consumer, I was thinking of an internal consumer, the employees. I was using similar skill sets that I had used in my marketing career, but I know as I advance in my career I’ll need to deepen my understanding of various HR-related rules and regulations to keep in mind when thinking about the workforce.
MBASchooled: You mentioned that you chose Vanderbilt Owen for its strength in HR. What resources, classes, or programs related to HR were most valuable to you?
Vanderbilt has an extremely robust MBA concentration, Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), specific to grooming HR leadership. This concentration offers a variety of classroom experiences to help HOP students become well-rounded HR professionals. From HR Analytics to Managerial and Organizational Effectiveness, classes within the concentration have taught me how to ask the right questions to ensure the appropriate systems are in place for individuals, teams, and organizations to reach their full potential.
In addition to the HOP concentration, the entire MBA curriculum, staff, and faculty at Vanderbilt has pushed me to be a more thoughtful leader. Regardless of the class I’m in, each of my professors leads the classroom conversation to go beyond the obvious next step and toward the next 10 steps, all with an emphasis on being an approachable, team-oriented, and strong leader along the way.
MBASchooled: How has your time in business school changed or evolved your own mindset about your career?
One thing that business school has taught me that I hope to hold onto is: having an interest in and paying attention to outside knowledge. Businesses all over the world have learned along the way and often-times share their stories; being aware of these learnings by reading books, listening to podcasts, or even watching the news will help me be a better-informed leader. We don’t always have to recreate the wheel when our organizations face something new.
MBASchooled: MBA students often cite company culture as an important priority. What are some things MBA students can do to figure out what the right company culture is for them?
There are a couple of ways to get an idea of what culture is. Whether someone is looking for a new job or trying to figure out which MBA program to attend, both of these can pertain:
- Have calls with people that work or have worked at the company (or go to that school)
- Visit the company (or school), see it for yourself
Reading about a culture, looking at pictures of a culture, those are nice—but at the end of the day they’re marketing materials. Talk to people, ask the questions that matter to you, and go see it for yourself. Before taking a job (or accepting a school offer), it’s important you set foot on campus to make sure it feels like a fit; your gut knows a lot about you and can tell you pretty quickly how things feel, but you can’t do that if you don’t hear about it first-hand or go to see it yourself.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for career switchers to successfully make career changes?
The truth is, no one else really knows what they’re doing either, so you might as well test and try things along the way in an attempt to find your passion. You can always go back to whatever you were doing before, don’t be afraid to try something new. It’s okay to feel uncomfortable and it’s okay to now know the ins-and-outs of something right away; no one is expecting perfect, don’t hold yourself to that standard. Go try some new stuff and learn along the way, that’s what life is for—living.