Episode 121 – Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries

Introducing Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries

Natasha is a digital marketing and SEO specialist. She lives near Toronto, Canada and enjoys sailing, hiking, skiing, playing trombone, soccer in Toronto FC.

Show Notes

Website | NatashaBD

Twitter | @natasha_bd

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 121.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries. After realizing that teaching and childcare just weren’t for her, Natasha is now living the agency life as a digital marketing and SEO specialist. She lives near Toronto, Canada and enjoys sailing, hiking, skiing, playing trombone, soccer in Toronto FC. Welcome, Natasha.

Natasha: Hey guys, how are you doing?

Tara: Hey, it’s great to meet you, Natasha. Thanks for joining us on Hallway Chats today. Would you please start by telling us a little bit more about yourself than what Liam just described?

Natasha: My name is Natasha. I’m 25 years old. In the last two years or so, I took an interesting little career pivot into the digital marketing world. For years, I was heading towards a career in social work, teaching. I’d always enjoyed working with kids. That’s my parents’ background, so just following them into that social services, mental health, just helping the community as a field of employment world.

I started into it after university and it was a mix of not really being able to pinpoint why but just knowing maybe it wasn’t the place I wanted to be for the next 20 or 30 years of my life as much as I loved it and knew I was good at it and got good feedback about how great I was at it. Also just a lack of long term opportunities. We all know some of the struggles of being young in today’s world. Even regardless of your age, just part-time employment, the gig economy, it’s getting harder and harder to find that stable fulltime long term job that you stay at for life.

I did my best. I had a great job for a year out of university where I went up to pull back for a year working in French-speaking school helping to teach English. That was a really great full job at university experience. Living in a French-speaking area, it was absolutely gorgeous where I was living. It was really great chance to just work and explore and have some fun while still making enough money and getting some good employment experience.

But when I came back to the Toronto area, it was just, you know, I could never find that full-time job. I was bouncing between two or three part-time jobs at once. I worked with some great people and had some great experiences along the way, but I was just like, “I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I got to move out of my mom’s house at some point, I got to know be able to live on my own and not always be working evenings and weekends.” There were times where I’d be waking up at 5 in the morning to start work at six and not getting home till 9 o’clock at night. Did it for a few years, but it just wasn’t a long term plan.

I did a bit of volunteer work for youth organization University kind of brand new advocacy and youth rights and participation. I did the communications and social media side of things for them. Through that I discovered I really enjoyed marketing communications. I got some feedback that I was really great at it. So it was something I toyed around for a while maybe going back to school for marketing.