After working for exactly 20 years at John Wiley & Sons (joining and leaving the company on June 1), Susan Spilka faced an uncertain future in her professional life. Spilka began her Wiley career as a manager and rose to v-p of corporate communications. But by 2013, she and other longtime Wiley senior executives were leaving the company as the result of a major corporate restructuring. Spilka had been instrumental in helping craft Wiley’s “internal and external communications” during a period in which Wiley’s revenue rose from $300 million in the early 1990s to more than $1.8 billion in 2013. But her time working for Wiley was over.
Today Spilka is the marketing and communications director at CHORUS (chorusaccess.org), a nonprofit startup that helps academic researchers comply with federal mandates to provide public access to publicly financed research. She describes CHORUS (Clearinghouse of the Open Research of the United States) as a “sustainable, cost effective way to meet the mandate without unnecessary disruption, expense, and duplication of effort." She’s still in publishing, just under different circumstances. “It’s exciting, and I’m working to build something,” she said.
However, in the summer of 2013, Spilka was an unemployed 58-year-old former publishing executive with a kid in college, trying to figure out her next step. “I didn’t want my career to end,” she said. “My time at Wiley was fantastic. I just had to figure out what to do.” The transition, she acknowledged, “wasn’t easy, after being out of the job market for so long.” But, invoking a Rolling Stones lyric, she said, “The things that happen may not be what you want, but they may be what you need. I needed a new challenge.”
She went back to school, enrolling in the digital marketing certificate program at NYU’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, in September 2013. “Social media is a new form of communication, but it’s not that different from things I used to do. But I needed to become familiar with the new digital tools,” she explained, citing platforms such as WordPress and Mailchimp. Later that year she began volunteering as a pregnancy counselor at the local Planned Parenthood office—“I wanted to try something different”—before transitioning quickly from volunteer to paid counselor. The volunteer experience was enjoyable, she said, but was also “somewhat scripted” and convinced her that she wanted to stay in communications.
Next, in early 2014, came a series of freelance consulting jobs, among them work for Prevention Links, a nonprofit organization that provides support to kids struggling with substance abuse—and eventually a freelance consulting job with CHORUS in June 2014. Shortly afterward she became the venture’s second full-time hire, right after CHORUS executive director Howard Ratner, who formerly worked at Macmillan and Springer, as well as Wiley. “I’m still in publishing and working with people I’ve known for 20 years,” Spilka said.
Spilka also gives partial credit for her new career to her premium account on LinkedIn, which widened her network and lifted her profile higher in job searches on the site. Broadening contacts was key, she said, because "the people you think are going to help you aren't necessarily the ones that do."
At CHORUS, Spilka’s duties encompass many of the same things she did at Wiley. “But I went from having a staff to now being much more hands-on and having to find ways to do the job without a lot of expensive tools.”
“I work from my home on Long Island, I go to conferences, and it’s been fun,” she said of the new job. “It’s a world that I know. The work people do in publishing will always be needed.”
Correction: In an earlier version of this story the term "academic publishers" was changed to "academic researchers;" the acronym CHORUS was changed to all caps; it's full name was added; and the passage "without unnecessary disruption, expense, and duplication of effort," was added to the description of CHORUS' work.
