After graduating from business school in May 2020, Audrey del Rosario thought that she had found post-MBA success. She had finally started working in a human capital role in the tech industry, a dream that was years in the making and fueled by experiences in her business school program.
However, when things didn’t pan out as expected because of the pandemic, Audrey realized that she needed to revisit her career choices once again. After a series of career experiments, she successfully made another career pivot. Audrey ultimately translated her passion for working with people in an HR role to a position in customer experience strategy, within the first two years after getting her MBA.
During our conversation, she spoke about her transition into a post-MBA job, learnings from her most recent career transition, and advice for soon-to-be MBA graduates about staying nimble in a changing job market.
MBASchooled: Think back to when you graduated from business school. What were you excited about or nervous about when you graduated?
I graduated in May 2020, when there were so many unknowns about the pandemic. I had a lot of different emotions at the time. Amidst so many stressors in that moment, I was first anxious that I might not have a full-time position or that my projected start date would be moved. Fortunately, my then-employer Google did keep my role, though my department and start date did eventually change.
I was also incredibly excited to start at a great company that I had previously interned for. I knew there would be a sense of familiarity with the organization and also newness as a full-time employee.
MBASchooled: What was it like to transition from business school back into the workplace? What did you enjoy, and what was challenging?
Starting work after business school and towards the beginning of the pandemic was probably the most difficult career transition I’ve ever had. It’s true for a lot of other people, and for me, mental and physical health were factors. The stress of trying to navigate this transition contributed to a limiting health condition that I’m still managing today.
Separate from that and coming from a full-time MBA program, I had to relearn what it was like to work full-time. This was not just in reorienting my schedule around what was considered to be “work-life balance” but also relearning how to drop into projects that were already in progress.
When I first started at Google, I had a lot of recent experiences in starting projects but fewer where I had to join projects that were already in motion. I learned this during one of my earliest projects in my post-MBA career. Here I was, equipped with all these consulting frameworks and ways to create quantitative models, yet my seemingly “logical” approach wasn’t resonating with my project stakeholders. I switched gears then to thinking more about the stakeholder engagement and alignment strategies I had to employ.
And to address the other part of this question: I enjoyed this process of discovering what was considered to be more of a business school best practice versus what would actually work for my own projects.
MBASchooled: Looking back upon your time in business school, what are things that you did in business school that has been valuable to you in your work and career?
I’m grateful I took coursework in what people consider “soft skills”, or specific classes in leadership, influence, negotiation, and persuasion. As a senior program manager in the technology industry, I use these skills every day.
To be a program manager in this industry is to effectively own multiple projects at the same time that roll up to a particular theme. You’re defining project scopes, developing schedules, aligning and orchestrating various groups, managing risk, helping deliver outcomes, and often communicating programmatic impact. It’s a lot of work that simply cannot be accomplished alone. You need to bring people with you along the way. I found that the best projects are those when you’ve offered opportunities for co-creation, or opportunities for others to build something with you.
Though I don’t think we ever stop learning about soft skills, I realize today that business school gave me a head start and a safe space to practice. I’m coming into work everyday with lessons learned from pre-business school positions, my now two post-business school companies, and business school classes.
MBASchooled: How have your thoughts about your career and professional success changed and evolved since graduating?
It’s funny. The last time we connected, I was talking in-depth about wanting to work in human capital strategy. I did spend some time working in human capital-related roles at Google. However, I actually realized that the function wasn’t for me, at least not at this moment in my career. Don’t get me wrong. Work in human resources and adjacent spaces is incredibly important, impactful, and difficult. It’s become even more difficult to work in these fields during the pandemic, and I have the utmost respect for anyone in them.
Over time, I realized that the intangible “humanness” element that I was seeking in business school and at work was not in the human resources function itself but in a different discipline. It was at Google that I fell in love with user experience work after learning more about the field during my MBA internship.
I had the privilege of practicing this discipline in a number of different areas at the company, and this is where I spend a lot of my time today. I now oversee user experience and customer experience-related projects for the Solutions Partner Program at HubSpot.
So all of this is a long-winded way of saying that I started my post-MBA career thinking I had achieved my goal of working in human capital strategy. I had worked towards it for several years, and I thought continuing to stick with that goal meant professional success. However, over a period of time in the pandemic, I realized that my goal no longer served me.
I’d now say that, no matter where you are in your career, make some space to experiment. In fact, even more space in this pandemic. Nowadays, I think professional success is a fluid thing, and it starts with figuring out your “why”. Why do you want or need to work? Success then means embracing and fulfilling that “why”.
MBASchooled: You recently made a career transition. How did this come about, and what did you learn from this process?
I genuinely enjoyed so many experiences I had at Google, and I’m incredibly grateful for the time I had and the people I met there. In fact, given the right group of projects and team, I’d consider going back. But, in February of this year, I decided to make a career move at HubSpot because I realized that my most immediate needs for career growth would be addressed elsewhere.
I came to Google with a previous background of having worked on product teams, yet I wanted to do human capital strategy work. My very first project at the company was during my summer internship in 2019, and it married these two concepts. My project focused on measuring the user experience of certain job candidate groups in our recruiting process, and for this, I used a lot of skills I learned from working on a product team. Namely, I employed techniques from the field of UX, or user experience, research.
The vision, when I converted to a full-time role, was to continue doing the same work, and I was initially slated to do so. But, as many people here know, the pandemic changed everything. Recruiting overall was impacted in 2020, and I was moved to a different division within People Operations.
That other division gave the chance to shape the user experience of other groups in our overall Alphabet ecosystem, and I specifically focused on digitizing a lot of the HR services we used to provide in our offices. It was impactful work to have done this globally, in every location where Alphabet had contingent workers, and I was able to run a lot of career experiments in such a short period of time.
By working on a variety of projects, I was able to isolate whether human capital strategy or user experience research gave me more energy. I was juggling both skill sets at any given point. In the end, I found that being able to work on UX-related projects was more personally meaningful, and I’ve since decided to take my career in this direction. More so, I chose to work at HubSpot for a chance to work on some externally facing products and processes, rather than the internal work I was doing for Google’s HR systems and processes.
So what does this look like in practice? At HubSpot, I hold a new role where I’m effectively creating a “voice of the customer” program for one of key customer groups, or solutions partners. These are digital agencies and providers that offer marketing, sales, web design, and CRM implementation services on behalf of HubSpot.
My work is to centralize any preexisting feedback channels we have for partners, elevate any research insights, and potentially stand up new opportunities where partners can provide input for corporate strategy and product development. I love what I do, and I have Google to thank for helping me grow my career in this direction.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have, for soon-to-be MBA Graduates (2nd Year MBAs) about how they can be successful in their life after business school?
First, business school, in some ways, rewards a goal orientation, but challenge yourself to look at the bigger picture when it comes to your career. In business school, we’re often asked questions like: Did you take all the necessary steps to recruit for an industry? Did you meet all the “right” people? Did you take all the necessary classes to complete a certificate? And the list goes on.
I did ask those questions of myself and had that goal of working in human capital strategy. In fact, you could argue that I met it. However, I don’t think I gave myself enough space to recognize that interests can and will likely change post-MBA, so I was unnecessarily hard on myself when I was going through that recent career transition.
Second, give yourself some grace to find your preferred working environment because a lot of companies are experimenting with different modes of working now. It may take some time to find the right one that works for you, and don’t always go for what others perceive to be the “best” company. Find the environment that works best for advancing your own professional and personal goals, and be kind to yourself along the way.
Third, don’t lose the momentum for networking that you developed in business school. Stay curious, still have coffee chats, and continue to invest in your relationships. You never know where they’ll take you. Relationships will help with many, many post-MBA moves you have yet to make.