Writing Is Everywhere in Business

Alumni Career Advisor: Jessica Sisto, Class of 1993

Profile by Mary Szymonowicz for Friends of Rutgers English

Like many incoming students, Jessica Sisto was undecided on a major when she first came to Rutgers. As a way to resolve her problem, she sat down with a catalogue and started circling every class that interested her. When literature courses clearly outnumbered everything else, she decided to major in English.

Pressures from home and worries about the job market inspired Ms. Sisto to double-major in Communications, but the study of literature was her first interest. After graduating in 1993, she took a job in advertising, intending to work for a while, then pursue an advanced degree and teach English at the university level.

On the job, Ms. Sisto realized that even the most basic skills of an English major are valuable. She was amazed to see a company-wide internal memo from a senior executive refer to an “employee opinion pole.” She realized that although many business people get away with sloppy writing, errors are always an embarrassment and reflect poorly on any company.

After working for two years in advertising, Ms. Sisto attended graduate school at Arizona State University where she completed a master’s degree in English and a Certificate in Scholarly Publishing. There, she taught literature and expository writing classes, and when students asked what jobs really used the writing skills they were learning, she’d simply say “What job doesn’t use writing?”  With a warning about company poles, she noted that the more you practice writing clearly and properly, the better you will do at communicating in any job.

Like many English majors, she was faced with the choice between using her marketable talent for writing or following her more personal love of literature. When it came time to decide whether to pursue a Ph.D., Ms. Sisto decided that her interest in writing was greater than her interest in teaching and scholarly research, and decided it was time to leave graduate school. It was a difficult decision, she says, and the possibility of going back still lingers.

Ms. Sisto has used her writing skills and English degrees in advertising, publishing, and software. In her current job, at Emerson Human Capital, she creates corporate training materials, a task very much like designing a college class. Because the company is a small consulting firm, Ms. Sisto works mostly from home, collaborating with her coworkers through email and phone calls.

At her interview for the job, she had to complete a writing test, where she was handed a laptop and told that she had an hour to write a guide to making a banana split. She was expected to present the material clearly and logically, and make sure the entire presentation was grammatically correct. As it turns out, this wasn’t just an abstract test – many of the projects she works on now are similar, just larger in scope.

For example, one recent project was to create a whole set of materials for training retail store managers, a task that involved fully understanding their needs, putting a huge amount of information into written form, and making it learnable by a wide range of employees that Ms. Sisto will never meet in person. Another responsibility she has is to take the contributions of four different team writers and make them consistent, as if one person wrote them all.

Although her current position doesn’t make use of her literary knowledge, Ms. Sisto’s writing and verbal skills have been the key to her success. She recommends a degree in English as a way to develop and perfect one’s writing skills, which form “the core foundation of all jobs.”

Ms. Sisto is a great resource for English majors who are considering graduate school, advertising, and many other types of communications consulting. To find contact information for Jessica Sisto, along with dozens of other Rutgers English Alumni who are willing to offer valuable advice, visit the Career Services Alumni Career Network. The password is "Henry".

If you are a graduate with advice to give, please sign up as a Career Advisor.