Humans of UiPath: Jessica Nolin on Learning as a Habit

I feel like I’ve grown immensely since I joined UiPath. Working for a company that moves this quickly, your only option to stay relevant is growth.”

Jessica Nolin, our Employee Experience Lead has been with UiPath for more than two years now. During these years, learning has been one of her top priorities. Actually, it has been constant during her life so far. 

“I grew up in a small town in Alaska. It had one stoplight. I think there were three thousand people. Everybody went to the same school for high school, middle school and so on. Then I ended up studying Political Science and Natural Resource Management because I really wanted to go into environmental policy when I got older.” 

Right after finishing her studies, Jessica won Miss Alaska and started her career in fashion. “Inevitably, I moved to New York. I worked for Chanel for at least half a decade through several different roles from retail to corporate, marketing and sales.”

She was still at her old job when she had Alora, her daughter. “I realized it was very hard to be a young single parent working in fashion and in New York City. And I needed a change. It was kind of an unforgiving industry to really be able to grow outside the role I was in or have any level of flexibility as a parent, which I found myself in desperate need of.” She started looking for another job without really knowing which direction to turn.

That’s when Jessica reconnected with an old friend that had moved back to New York, Robin Fish. They went to elementary school together in that small town in Alaska. Robin was already working for UiPath and she suggested Jessica should apply for a job here. “I felt like I didn’t know anything about tech. But I still did it. I originally interviewed for the Employer Brand team to do events and marketing because that was the most transferable knowledge I had from my previous role. Events and marketing space in New York City were definitely something I had experience in.” She got the job. 

Over the past two years, Jessica spent a lot of time outside work learning about the tech industry and really becoming a student of it. “And then, you know, through the course of my work, I've had a chance to manage and work with teams of different sizes at different points. I got the job of running employer branding events. I stayed in that role for I think about the first year of my time here at UiPath. Then I transitioned into leading employee experience for the company. I shifted from helping attract some of the best talent in the region to helping retain that talent and creating systems that could support it. And that's really where we're at now as we work toward becoming a more structured place that has everything that people really look for in a company.”

While at UiPath, Jessica continued her learning journey. She passed one internal leadership program for new leaders and she also completed Accomplishment Coaching, which is a life coaching certification program. “It's considered kind of one of the top schools for coaching and it's globally recognized. I finished that school and I'll be working to finish my certification in the next hopefully three to four months as I accumulate my coaching hours. I'm currently doing that on the weekends.”

Since her time at UiPath, Jessica joined several different organizations tying to upskill and kind of spread her wings outside the industry she once was in. She currently sits on the founding board of Peak, which is an event planning group in New York.

She’s also focused on being a change agent when it comes to Diversity initiatives within UiPath and outside of the company. “I also am in a listening circles group with other people and we focus either on diversity inclusion or employee experience. Aside from that, I started reaching out to a few female organizations to start creating partnerships to help get my coaching hours and then to help give back.” 

Jessica thinks her manager and her team are very supportive of her growth and she’s trying to do the same.

I'll often ask my team in their check ins what they're doing for their own mental health and wellness and career growth outside work.”

Jessica is trying to pass her passion for learning to her daughter through activities and games. “It's not like we’re doing learning just one time of day. But we started incorporating learning into daily activities. If I could give any advice to the parents out there, this is the one thing I found in the past few months. We've started writing books together as a way to get her engaged in practicing reading and writing. And learning foreign languages like Spanish or French though index cards all over the house with labels of objects like furniture or other things. It’s something that helped a lot in these times.”

Learning is something that we’re surely focusing on. It’s in our DNA as a company. And Jessica is one of our champions.