Joining our podcast team today is Ben Adams, Senior Associate Dean of Students for QuadEx, as they discuss an answer, or many, to the question how do we highlight our transferrable skills? Public Speaking, creative writing, juggling? We all have skills that we perform on a daily basis that inform the work we do, the question is, do we utilize them to tell our stories and advocate for ourselves when new opportunities arise?

Transcript:
- Hello and welcome to the "What's Career Got To Do With It?" podcast, where we hope to provide a space for honest conversation and information that encourages a listener to take the next steps in their career journey. Wherever you're at in this process, we hope that this episode will meet you with affirmation, guidance, and maybe some laughs along the way.

- Joining us today is Ben Adams, senior Associate Dean of Students for Quad X. As we discuss an answer or many to the question, "How do we highlight our transferable skills?" ♪ Dun, dun, dun ♪

- I don't know what they are. I'm just kidding. They're on the website, maybe.

- Not there on the website.

- But Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it having you here.

- Yeah.

- It means a lot. And we'd love for you to do a brief introduction of who you are and how you got here.

- Awesome. That sounds great, y'all. Thanks again for having me. It's fun to be with you guys and just kinda chat a little bit about careers and life skills and transferrable skills and everything. So again, thanks to the team here at the career center for making this happen. Just a brief background of kinda who I am. Again, my name is Ben, senior Associate Dean of Quad X, which is a role that I've been in for wrapping up year one. Kinda stepping into year two is as we evolve, as with kinda what we're doing with Quad X. So a little bit of background about who I am. I am a Duke grad. We can start there. So I graduated from Duke in 2008 with a degree in public policy, but I have had very, very different roles, kind of, over the course of my lifetime. So I think that there's perhaps two ways of telling the story. One is just kind of what I've done and how I've evolved over the course of time, which if you do it through that lens, you know, I've kinda worn a number of hats. I've been a high school US history teacher. I was an admissions officer for Duke, and I ran all of our work around international student. I didn't run the international student recruitment process, but I was part of that team. But I also led what we did with first generation college student recruitment while I was at Duke. I have been a director of development and external affairs for an organization to help build a school in Durham. And so, I have strong connections to the Durham community and to North Carolina as a whole. I went to divinity school and became a pastor, and I was a pastor of a church, a United Methodist Church in Cary, North Carolina. So I know the Cary community well and kind of have connection to the faith community. And then now I am in this role in student affairs. So like from that, if you were to like map that life, this kid is all over the place. Like, he's keeps a job for like three years or four years and bounces around, and the career trajectory just kind of looks a little bit like a series of or game of shoots and ladders, right? Where you just kind of go one direction and then go back in a different direction. And that's one way of telling this story. And I think that's, you know, that's how people, when they look at resumes, the traditional resume, right? Might read it. But I think the way that I view it is a story of purpose and, like, what is your purpose in life? And if you can kind of begin to hone in on what that is, it can manifest itself in so many different ways. And so, the way I tell it to folks is, my purpose in life is to foster communities where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. Like, that's what I do. Now, what that has