About You & Your Role
Meet Jocelyn Wright, SRM’s Director of Community and Market Development, focused on expanding SRM’s reach and strengthening relationships across higher education.
It’s a highly collaborative role — I’m constantly on calls with our sales, marketing, and LXD teams. My main areas of focus are expanding our partnerships and visibility in higher education, bringing new offerings to market, creating compelling thought leadership content, and building community in the higher education space.
What excites you most about working here?
The variety of people and types of projects we get to work with is very invigorating for me. I love getting to meet with and figure out ways to effectively support clients across higher education, as well as those at corporations and nonprofits. And I love that every project is different. It challenges me to always be learning — there’s always something that we can do to improve or try something differently.
What is one major shift you’ve noticed in education, content, or instructional design recently?
One shift? It feels like everything in higher education is in motion right now, from accreditation to how students are using AI to incorporating more workforce alignment into course and program design. It’s an exciting time — easy to get really lost. I think higher education institutions need to do some real looking in the mirror and think deeply about their identity, their mission, and what they want to preserve during this time of transition. It’s easy to get swept up into trends or policies out of necessity, and when so much is changing so fast, it’s easy to lose who you are. I feel like that’s a big risk for a lot of higher education institutions right now.
In your opinion, how is technology (AI, microlearning, immersive media, etc.) changing educational solutions?
There’s a major push to do things faster — three-year degrees, microcredentials, using AI to speed through busy work and bypass rote memorization. The question for a lot of students looking at colleges and universities these days seems to be: “What do I need to do to get a job?” I spent way too much of my young adulthood in school — and I loved every second of it — so I find it hard to identify with this approach, personally. I completely understand that people want and need jobs, and that this economy is a terrifying one to be entering into, especially with minimal work experience. That said, I think it’s very short-sighted to just be thinking about the first job out of school. I think there’s real value in building skills that may not be directly applicable to a job, in following what interests you and seeing where it takes you. Building a career takes time. But I also have a PhD in French, so consider the source.
Can you share a project you’ve worked on at SRM that you feel made a significant impact?
Some of my favorite projects are our Product Development Workshops. They take all kinds of different forms — we’ve helped clients with everything from developing a prototype course or module to thinking through a curricular framework. I find these projects fun because the team is in brainstorming mode the entire time. It’s all about understanding the client’s specific needs and goals, and then thinking about creative, compelling, effective ways to meet those goals.
How does SRM’s approach stand out in the industry?
We have an amazing group of people working here who genuinely, deeply care about the work they do and doing it the best way they possibly can. I love bragging about our project teams to prospective clients because it’s impossible to oversell their level of commitment — every client who works with us has nothing but positive things to say about how organized, attentive, and flexible our project teams are.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone interested in a role like yours?
I didn’t even know my role existed until I applied for it. I certainly wasn’t thinking about it when I was first getting on the job market. But I kept moving in directions that seemed interesting to me, taking on projects or extracurriculars that spoke to my passions. It sounds trite, but following my passions within each role I had really did bring me to a job I love.
What’s a fun or unexpected fact about you that you would like to share?
Je parle français. Y hablo un poquito de español también.
I love languages. They’re portals to another way of seeing the world. I had a friend in college who was bilingual, and when he struggled to solve a problem in English, he’d think about it in French. Half the time it would get him unstuck. I think that’s such a powerful example of how language really shapes how we see the world around us. Even for people who just speak one language, the words that we choose and use have tremendous power to shape our understanding of what we’re seeing around us.
