Rethinking My Path Forward

Things haven’t been going well in my job search. I’ve been more active over the past few months, but the results have been pretty discouraging. Roles I’m fully qualified for, and confident I’d excel in, often end in silence or rejection before I even get a chance to speak with someone. If you’ve been following the job market lately, my story isn’t unique.

For years, I’ve been a generalist in my career. That partly comes from my early days as a solo developer, where whatever needed doing, I was the one to do it. My approach was similar when I was in technical support, leadership, or engineering roles. The consistent theme across all the roles is that I’ve focused on solving problems in a customer-centric way. That has taken many forms: building tools, fixing broken flows, adding new features, updating documentation, troubleshooting complex issues, or creating entirely new processes.

Thankfully, I have a great support system and have received advice from some unexpected but welcome places. I haven’t always been able to put that advice fully into practice yet, and maybe that’s part of why employers haven’t been seeing the value I can bring.

Recently, I had a screening interview with a company I was really excited about but didn’t make it past that first stage. However, the recruiter I spoke with turned out to be the most helpful one I’ve interacted with so far. She gave me valuable feedback: one of the main reasons I wasn’t moving forward was my lack of demonstrable experience with accessibility.

For years, I’ve known about accessibility and its importance, and I’ve done the basics in the projects I’ve worked on. Even back when I was making Flash intros and banners (yes, it’s been a while), I tried to make sure the main content was still accessible and the intros easy to bypass. Being color blind myself, I’ve also always been mindful of color contrast and readability.

Pioneers like Jeffrey Zeldman taught me early on the importance of semantic markup and web standards, lessons I’ve carried with me ever since. How cool is it that years later I actually got to work with Zeldman.

During my time at Automattic, I made sure that the apps I worked on were at least keyboard accessible and compatible with screen readers like VoiceOver. But there were still a lot of areas I didn’t explore deeply, and I’ve never spent much time with the many accessibility testing tools that exist.

That feedback, combined with a few personal realizations, got me thinking seriously about where I’m lacking and what I can do about it. I’ve started updating my podcast library to focus on accessibility, following more accessibility experts on social media to learn from them, and taking online courses, starting with the free Introduction to Web Accessibility course from the W3C.

There’s still so much to learn and a lot of practice ahead, but already this focus has opened my eyes and given me a renewed sense of purpose. Going forward, I want to move away from being a generalist and instead specialize in accessibility to make what I build more inclusive and impactful. It will take a lot of time and work, but it’s also something I can start to incorporate right away into anything I do. I’m genuinely excited to focus here.