Every career journey is filled with twists and turns, culminating in an epiphanic moment when it feels as though all of your experiences and skills exist for a reason.
At least, that’s exactly what it felt like for Amanda Beaudette when she was recently promoted to the role of consultant at Workhuman. She said that she has always been that person who others go to for advice, given her innate ability to listen and empathize. Now, in her current role, she gets to extend that same kindness to the company’s customers, fueled by encouragement from her peers and managers, who gave her the confidence to “just go for it.”
Gaining the confidence to grow is key for anyone on their professional journey, including Mark Pogozelski, an inside sales representative at Tufin. After receiving advice from his manager and others, he felt empowered to transition into his current role. And so far, Pogozelski shared, his new team members have made it easy to get up to speed on new job responsibilities as he gains the skills needed to navigate challenging accounts, overcome obstacles and more.
By cultivating an environment that empowers employees to take the initiative, companies can make it easy to help their employees thrive. Just ask Jake Evans, who was recently promoted to health consultant at Gradient AI, where he’s currently focused on helping the company’s clients reap the benefits of its AI solutions. According to him, his growth at the company is due in part to the company’s culture itself, which gives employees ample opportunities to share ideas — and show their initiative.
For Beaudette, Pogozelski and Evans, working for companies that prioritize internal mobility and upskilling has been fundamental to their continued professional growth. Read on to learn more about each one’s recent promotion and how their employers make it easy to evolve.
Through Workhuman’s employee recognition platform, organizations can acknowledge work anniversaries, celebrate life milestones, provide performance feedback and more.
Tell us about your recent promotion or role change.
Helping customers succeed has always been a passion of mine. For more than 10 years, I’ve supported customers in many ways in a variety of roles, but I still found myself searching for something more impactful. In my personal life, friends, family and strangers gravitate toward me to ask for advice; I am always that person who will listen and empathize. For the last few years, I focused on those skills in my professional life, and it makes perfect sense that I would gravitate toward a role where I can maximize these skills. I believe in doing what is right for the customer, for our business and for myself. This is a value I lead with in everything I do.
In my previous role, I focused on listening, guiding, advising and sharing past experiences to develop my skills in the effort of finding a role where I can really make a difference. My peers and managers have consistently reminded me that I have the skills to fulfill the role of my dreams, which has given me the confidence to “just go for it.” I am so thankful that I did, and I’m grateful that my career has led me to this moment. It was a long journey, and it was absolutely worth it.
What will this new role or skill let you do?
Historically, I’ve held lower-level roles that prevented my work from being seen or considered for an important role as a consultant. My career started in an administrative capacity, where I quickly learned the value of teamwork, attention to detail and time management. I supported multiple departments, gained experience in data management and customer relationships, and became familiar with the inner workings of our specific corporate environment at Workhuman. These tools, combined with hands-on experience, gave me the confidence to take on more strategic roles and eventually transition into consulting.
Now, as a consultant, I can truly focus on helping businesses identify their pain points, help create actionable solutions and achieve long-term success while helping our program managers look like rockstars in the process. I am thrilled to utilize the skills I developed over the past decade to deliver curated strategies that have a real impact on customers and their businesses. My transition from admin roles to consulting has been a rewarding journey of continuous learning, personal growth and a commitment to making a meaningful impact on customers and our business.
“Now, as a consultant, I can truly focus on helping businesses identify their pain points, help create actionable solutions and achieve long-term success while helping our program managers look like rockstars in the process.”
How would you describe Workhuman’s approach to internal mobility or upskilling?
Workhuman offers many ways to grow and develop within our organization. It encourages employees to try new things, improve their skills, do work they’re passionate about and invest in their personal development. I’m grateful for these resources because they helped me realize my career dreams. When I was promoted to customer success manager in the middle of 2024, I was very focused on the consulting role as the next major milestone in my career. Keeping this as a priority, I shared that sentiment with my manager and the human experience team, and both were very supportive of my career path and journey. I always knew I wanted to be a consultant, but I wasn’t sure how to get there.
With the support of my manager, peers and the HX team, my refined skills and a renewed sense of confidence, I was perfectly placed to apply for the consultant role. My work shined through the interview process, and I grew even more confident in my skills and tenure with the company. I am humbled that all my hard work has culminated in this moment, and I was welcomed with heartfelt praise by my new team. I am grateful for this opportunity, and I am excited to make an even greater contribution to both our customers and our business on this journey.
Tufin’s solutions are designed to help large enterprises manage and enforce a unified security policy across their complex networks and cloud environments.
Tell us about your recent promotion or role change.
I recently was given the opportunity to move into an inside sales role from the business development team. I am extremely grateful for this new position and gained a lot of support from different areas of Tufin to prepare me. Through advice from my manager and others who had moved on from the business development team, I felt confident and prepared to take on this next step in my career. I now work with an experienced sales team from whom I have a lot to learn. Being able to have a good relationship with managers and executives at the company made it easy to communicate what I was looking for and for them to give me the transparency into what the business needed. The newly formed strategic account team has been quick to bring me up to speed and help me with learning the new skills I’ll need to be successful in this role. Their willingness to help and use my support with accounts they are working on has given me a lot of confidence to keep moving forward as a sales professional.
What will this new role or skill let you do?
In this new role, I’m being exposed to the entire sales process from start to finish. In my previous role, I really only worked the beginning stages of initiating contact with a company. Now, I can learn the right way to go through the sales motion from seasoned veterans. Working with three proven sales leaders at Tufin, I’m able to learn different styles and strategies when it comes to managing a deal, being exposed to some of the larger and more challenging accounts that our company works with, and understanding the right way to jump the hurdles that come along the way. It’s such a great step in my career to be involved in the day-to-day activities and interactions that need to be done to become successful in a fast-paced sales environment with the support of an experienced team. Getting comfortable with the conversations, product and other work that needs to be done is putting me in an incredible position to hit the ground running when it’s time to manage my own accounts and goals.
“Getting comfortable with the conversations, product and other work that needs to be done is putting me in an incredible position to hit the ground running when it’s time to manage my own accounts and goals.”
How would you describe Tufin’s approach to internal mobility or upskilling?
Tufin’s culture as a whole has a strong family feel. Even with teams spread across the globe, it’s like a family reunion whenever we all have the opportunity to get together. In terms of internal mobility, I felt as though I had so much support from all different levels of the company, from my manager giving me advice to get my name out there, to old team members guiding me into practices that got them promoted, to the C-suite executive who was willing to sit down with me and discuss what opportunities might be coming up in the near future. From top to bottom, everyone was communicative, honest and helpful. When I first started at Tufin in an entry-level sales role, I watched my more experienced teammates move into all sorts of roles like engineering, marketing, account management, sales operations and more. This further reinforced my belief that if you show interest and demonstrate hard work, it will be recognized, and they will reward you. The relationships with people built here go deeper than a standard work environment, and I feel they truly want to help you succeed.
Gradient AI serves clients that specialize in group health, property and casualty insurance and workers’ compensation, offering AI solutions that perform tasks like predicting underwriting and claim risks and reducing quote turnaround times and claim expenses.
Tell us about your recent promotion or role change.
I am excited to share that our continued growth has presented opportunities for us to provide a new line of consulting services to our clients, which led to my promotion as a health consultant. As a SaaS company, we strive to create software that our clients can interact with on their own time after they’ve been properly trained and given the tools to do so. However, when the software provided is industry-leading AI modeling for health and property and casualty insurers, the complexity of individual use cases can quickly multiply.
As we continued to grow, we reevaluated how we package and provide our software, which led us to create our new managed services team. In this newly created managed services team, we can position ourselves to proactively provide consulting services to clients who may need extra resources to ensure they’re reaping the full value of what we can offer.
What will this new role or skill let you do?
Since joining Gradient AI, knowledge of our models and client communication have been cornerstones of what I need to excel in servicing our clients. These are skills that I enjoy, but as someone who has spent almost all their professional career in some sort of consulting capacity in the health industry, I have always looked for new ways our clients can interact with our models. I believe this love of connecting with clients on a more granular level led me to my new role as a health consultant. In this role, I am excited to expand upon the versatility that our AI modeling can provide our clients in a consultative manner.
“In this role, I am excited to expand upon the versatility that our AI modeling can provide our clients in a consultative manner.”
For example, on a given day, I could meet with three different clients who are all purchasing the same AI model, but each client comes from a different vertical and stage in the employer healthcare purchasing lifecycle. By leveraging the skills and knowledge that I’ve learned over my career, I am excited to be able to provide tailored, consultative services that leverage my experience to influence how our clients interact and ingest our model’s outputs.
How would you describe Gradient AI’s approach to internal mobility or upskilling?
Gradient AI is the first fully remote job that I’ve held in my career, so collaborating with other teams and senior leadership via Slack, emails and Zoom meetings required an adjustment. I initially feared I wouldn’t be given opportunities to share my ideas; however, upon my first week, I came to find out that we had standing meetings with team leads and often senior leadership. Now, just because there were standing meetings didn’t mean internal mobility and upskilling were a given, but the opportunities were there, which is all an individual with initiative needs.
Speaking from my own experience, I felt that a particular client vertical of ours could grow more rapidly if we reformatted and presented our outputs in a way that differed from our standard. After voicing my ideas, I soon found out that I wasn’t the only one who felt that way and was allowed to formally present my ideas. Fast forward to today, it may not be the direct cause, but I believe that by seizing the opportunities that Gradient AI consciously provides their employees to learn from each other, I was able to showcase my initiative, which I believe ultimately led to my new role.
