Not Every Path is Linear

Not all careers are linear. Market researchers don’t always start as a junior analyst and work their way up the proverbial ladder rung by consecutive rung to executive vice president or president. Some of us take a more ping pong approach, bouncing from one opportunity to the next, gaining a wide variety of experience that looks too broad at first glance, but can be incredibly valuable when positioned well.

My own career in market research started at a United States Department of Energy national laboratory. I was a document formatter, which sounds as exciting as it was. I took research papers written by scientists at the lab and put them into the lab’s standard template, applying header styles and line spacing and getting the indentation for lists perfectly consistent throughout.

This might shock readers, but this wasn’t a very high-demand service at the lab. Scientists didn’t want to spend their precious grant money paying for someone to do this work unless it was absolutely necessary.

But I was also responsible for seeking out enough projects to keep 40 billable hours per week. So, during one particularly slow document formatting season, I started marketing myself as an editor and writer in addition to being a formatter. Being the pragmatic person that I am, I wrote up a biography sharing my skills and education and shared it with the equivalent of the CEO’s chief of staff, asking if they would mind sending it to the entire organization.

Shortly after hitting send on that email to the chief of staff, my manager arrived at my desk and told me there was another set of projects I could support that weren’t just formatting papers.

The Market Research Life

I became the second survey programmer at the lab. Over the next 7 years, I established the first end-to-end market research team at the lab, with primary and secondary researchers and a part-time statistician to support analytics and reporting.

I was having fun, but I had become an active member of the mrx Twitter community and ran into new terminology all the time that it seemed everyone else knew but me. I moved to private sector work to expand my career, and found myself managing operations for a global advertiser customer satisfaction study for Microsoft.

I was laid off from that role, and I contracted with a research supplier before moving into a full-time role with a business consulting firm. While at that firm, I found myself absent-mindedly counting the number of raincoat brands and colors as people entered the bus on my way to work, curious to know which brand seemed to be the most popular (I was in need of a raincoat).

That’s when I realized I needed to go back into market research; it was too natural for me to be curious and to try to measure the world around me! (For the other curious folks like me: black Arcteryx was first place for that particular ride, with black Columbia coats a very close second).

I soon landed a role doing inbound marketing, blogging, and training for a survey software company, then worked as a research director for a couple of research vendors. I was recruited again by Microsoft to lead a study I’d managed as a vendor, then moved into research operations to work on the department’s digital transformation initiative.

After a few years, I went back to the market research technology space to balance my B2B research experience with B2C research experience, supporting customers in all sorts of industries who were doing ad and concept testing.

Then came building a consulting program to support customers who purchased the tech but were too short-staffed to use it. And most recently, I enjoyed the experience of building an internal research team to support reviewing and updating AI-generated assets so customers could get the best of both worlds without sacrificing speed.

Positioning the Experience

Does it seem like my career bounced all over? Let me show you how the threads weave together.

My experience at the lab taught me the basics of customer relationship management and managing multiple research projects at the same time. This served me well not only when working with global stakeholders at Microsoft, but again when working for agencies as a research director and again at restech companies where I worked with multiple customers in multiple industries.

My first experience at Microsoft gave me international research experience, including valuable lessons in cultural nuance when translating studies and when communicating with global stakeholders. It taught me about partnering with an agency to execute research. And it taught me the world of templated report shells to provide a consistent look and feel when delivering data across the world.

Marketing and blogging taught me about communicating, and it taught me about working with sales and engineering teams to evolve a product, conduct webinars and focus messaging, and was my first experience with automated marketing campaigns.

My second experience at Microsoft taught me the value of secondary research to support primary research findings and how to get to the actual business decision being made so the right research is being done. It also gave me more visibility into the variety of functions under the market research umbrella, including social listening, marketing mix modeling, UX research, and data science. I gained experience creating and executing workshops for large groups, giving me practice with distilling information for my audience.

And this all helped me know what to look for when seeking consultants to support customers, when building an internal research function, and when supporting proposals, sales strategies, and customer success strategies to deliver excellent customer experiences.

…and Beyond

If there is one piece of advice I would give incoming or even mid-career market researchers, it’s to stay curious and don’t be afraid to try something new. Your skills are quite often far more transferable than they seem at first glance. If you don’t see it, ask a friend to help. Describe your experience to date, and ask them what skills it sounds like you’ve gained. You might be surprised what they say!

Be open to new experiences, be it moving from supplier-side research to customer-side, or vice versa. Or moving to a research technology company. Your next role might just be in your peripheral vision instead of straight ahead.