Adam Gonnerman

Not every career advancement is the result of a deliberate plan. Sometimes the right environment finds you at the right moment, and what you do with that opportunity determines everything that follows. After working at Zepinvest, a small New York City startup, I had developed a working foundation in content curation, content management, basic HTML, and the practical realities of keeping a web presence running. It was hands-on, scrappy work, and it prepared me well for what came next. My following role was as a web producer at Condé Nast, a considerably larger stage with considerably higher expectations. I did not know it at the time, but that position would become one of the most formative experiences of my professional life. In my early days as a web producer I sat in conference rooms where conversations about projects, products, and timelines felt like a foreign language. People moved through discussions with a fluency I did not yet have, and I spent more than a few meetings simply...

Not every career follows a straight line. Mine has not come close to one, and I have spent enough time now looking back at the path to say with confidence that nothing along the way was wasted, even the parts that looked like detours at the time. When my family moved to New Jersey in 2005, I was walking away from full-time ministry without a clear idea of what came next. I explored options that ranged from the practical to the improbable. Tree trimming was on the list at one point. What I landed on first was a job teaching English as a Second Language in Newark. The pay was low and there were no benefits, but it was work, and it was work that required me to communicate clearly across significant cultural and linguistic distance every single day. I did not think of it as professional development at the time. Looking back, it was exactly that. Having taken an introductory paralegal course while living in New Mexico, I got the idea of pursuing work at a law firm. Without credentials or ...