We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jennifer Wade a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Jennifer with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
I’ve always had a pretty solid work ethic, even from the beginning of my elementary school days. One could probably place me in the overachiever category. From very early on, I’ve worked to establish solid routines, and I developed boundaries between when it’s time to work and when it’s time to play. As I came home from school, it was homework time. Fun time could come after. I’ve always had quite high expectations for myself, so doing what I can to kill it in all aspects, especially school and work, is just a no brainer.
As far as where this work ethic truly came from – I’d say it’s all about observing others. My parents never put unrealistic expectations on me, but I watched my dad and his own work ethic – knowing how hard he worked to get to where he was. My parents made it so that my sister and I didn’t have to worry about much at all. Even though it was much easier for us, that wasn’t an excuse to just sit back and lazily progress forward. If anything, it pushed me to have an even greater work ethic over the years.
I view my work ethic as the biggest reason I am where I am today. It is one of my characteristics for which I am most proud.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Jennifer Wade – the ‘jwade’ of jwadeDESIGNS! I’ve drawn for my whole life, but it wasn’t until our favorite era of COVID that I decided to actually side hustle it and start my own LLC. My true day job is all about IT – managing engineers and others to build out and deliver quality technical solutions for retail and service. As you can imagine, there’s not much creative brightness that comes with computer science and software engineering, and I’m honestly just too bright of a person to keep all that bottled within. Any chance I get, I will add color to work – including creating mascots for my teams, leading fun campus events, and hello custom holiday cards! While those little slivers of brightness were nice over the years, I decided it was really time that I branched out and gave my illustrations more room to grow.
For the past two to three years, I’ve started attending local festivals – and I mean walking distance from my house ‘local’. My biggest successes have come from collaborations with others – creating custom coloring books and holiday cards for another local business as well as custom prints and portraits of people’s pets. I do still love my original works – the goat in a float will forever be my own personal mascot – and it’s always great when a customer gets the same joy out of one of my float collection pieces.
At the end of the day, it’s all about bringing back some lightness and brightness to create smiles for others. If that’s my goat in a float, great. If that’s a custom print or card of your own little furry best friend, superb! I’m here for the warm and fuzzies, and I hope that you feel that with a jwadeDESIGNS creation.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The top three areas that have been the most impactful on my overall journey would have to be – networking, my high-quality work ethic, and a positivity and willingness to dig in and help others. I am still working on using these skills to boost my more artistic endeavor, but when it comes to my overall professional career and journey, there’s no doubt that these three areas are reason for my success.
As a natural introvert, the networking piece has been one of the hardest. I honestly used the other two skills- work ethic and helping others – as my way to boost my surrounding network. Early in my career, I used my routine-building ways to show a drive and a work ethic that was respected by my peers and leaders. As I got more confident in my abilities and slowly became a SME, I used those skills to ensure I never left anyone hanging. Any request, question, whatever that came my way, I always ensured I found an answer, even if that was finding another person or group to do the actual answering. My reliability, resourcefulness, and swiftness to respond to others was key in my career growth and progression. It’s truly what I try to coach my team in as they are beginning their own careers.
I’ll let you know when I start to get serious about using these three skills in boosting my jwadeDESIGNS career. There’s no doubt they will translate over well – just need to do it!
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
One of those key skills that I’ve used to grow my IT career, I would love to get better at for my artistic one – networking. As I’ve really honed into what I love to illustrate – bright and cheery animals – I realized that I would love to create a special collection that could be displayed in places like veterinarian or pediatrician offices. Funny animals in glasses for an optometry office. Animals with big, pearly whites to distract from the fear of a dentist’s visit. If there’s anyone out there who happens to be looking for a custom, cute collection to bring smiles to their patients or clients, I am here and ready! Shoot me an email ([email protected]) and let’s get to collaborating.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jwadedesigns.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jwadedesigns/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jwadedesigns
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-wade/
Image Credits
Ryan Wade
