Moving your career forward can sometimes feel like riding a wooden roller coaster; it’s bumpy as hell, occasionally thrilling, and seemingly impossible to tell whether you’re making the right move or your next biggest mistake. And quite often the advice stops there, where friends and coworkers help you paint what’s possible with broad strokes without any concrete tips to really ensure your success.
That’s where Lisa Skeet Tatum comes in Co Founder and CEO of Landit.com. This is the optimistic strategist your career has been missing. And seeing as she raised $2 million dollars in VC funding to launch Landit, a lot of people have cosigned on her chops of success, to bring you to the next level. While Forbes is calling the site “The New LinkedIn for Women,” Landit really goes beyond creating a network for advancing your career — it holds your hand, elevates your thinking and coaches every decision you make along the way.
“I realized there are millions of women who will find themselves at an inflection point,” she says. “Whether it is ‘I am in a position and I am just trying to successfully navigate’ or ‘I’m trying to transition and trying to figure out what’s next.’ It’s so daunting. As we sit here today, we have the largest number of professional women, not firing on all cylinders. But they want to be.”
How She Connected The Dots
Lisa recognizes this inflection point better than most, as Landit.com was born from a place of her own career transition. “This was very personal for me,” she admits. “I started off as an engineer, then spent over a decade as a VC and then found myself kind of living a double life, where I had this day job, and then I’ve always been committed to creating access to others.” A commitment that includes the multiple board of directors memberships and heavy involvement with dozens of service organizations. “So I said, you know what, I want to find a way to combine the two of these. And for the first time in my life, I had no idea what that looked like.”
But according to the Harvard grad, everyone expected her to know what that looked like, creating that all too familiar, uncomfortable pressure and uncertainty. Luckily, Lisa was accepted into the Henry Crown Fellowship Program around the same time this idea started to formulate in her mind. “I was accepted into this program where you have to have a project and I didn’t know what my project was. But I thought, the more I was on it, I realized that my project was ME.”
Her own story of transitioning throughout her career quickly began to unfold the pillars of Landit. “When I think of all that untapped, unleashed talent, and I think about my own angst as I was going through this, I said you know what, what have I learned over time, what do I wish I had had, and what would be that playbook? That insider insight and navigation that we would give to everyone, to essentially help her land her it.”
How To Use It Best
One thing that stands out about Landit, is that it feels almost freakishly intuitive. For example, I happen to be a writer, art director and ux/ui expert. No career test has ever been able to pin down this hybrid career trajectory I enjoy. However Landit’s assessment broke through my skepticism suggesting that I was a writer, creative director and entrepreneur.
“It starts with the woman herself,” explains SkeetTatum as she walks me through the assessment process. “One of the things I was so moved by, as we were putting this together, is that women were not even believing that there were possibilities. And we said, no. Let’s take that personal bias out of ‘what are your possibilities’, ask a little bit about your background, and say these are your skills, and that’s the basis.”
It’s a model that allows Landit to dig in acutely and pick out suggestions that feel right. “We were very intentional about it,” she insists. “For instance, we don’t ask if your partner’s supportive. Because you can be supportive, but if you’re not flexible, that doesn’t really impact what your possibilities are, right? So we start by asking some of the personal questions and based on that, these are the things that become the bases for the curation.”
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