“Many people can identify specific career goals, but I’ve never been one of them.”
Thom Dimmock, who now serves as associate director of academics at Blueprint Test Prep, may not be adept at seeing his destination clearly, but he has learned to know himself well — and find confidence in that.
“Rather than naming where I want to be or what I want to do and charting a path to get there, I have identified how I want to be and what context allows me to thrive,” he said.
Over time spent in various roles, Dimmock has found he likes being helpful, feeling challenged, mastering new skills and delivering results, especially when he is able to work toward a shared mission alongside talented colleagues. While that list may seem full of “nice-to-haves” that are rarely found altogether in one role, Dimmock has found his fit.
“At Blueprint Test Prep, those are a given,” he said. “I have an incredible mentor in my boss, a world-class team to lean on and develop, and work that challenges and fulfills me.”
Dimmock didn’t just land at Blueprint Test Prep by luck or via a linear path. After building a career in research and data in his twenties, Dimmock felt stuck but worried that shifting into a new career would waste all his previous work experience and effort to advance.
“Now, thanks to the career growth I have seen at Blueprint, I realize that that mindset was all wrong,” he told Built In. “No skill is wasted, so you should never be afraid to pivot.”
“No skill is wasted, so you should never be afraid to pivot.”
Surprisingly, Dimmock has found myriad connections between his past roles and the new, seemingly unrelated roles at Blueprint Test Prep as he has grown.
“When you have a good thing going, you show up day after day, do the work and grow where you’re planted,” he said. “Those days of feeling unfulfilled and in the wrong place are long behind me. At Blueprint, I’ve gotten everything I wanted out of my career.”
Built In sat down with Dimmock to learn more about his journey to joining the company, how strong support has helped him thrive and what he sees for his continued advancement.
Give us a snapshot of your career so far.
After graduating college with degrees in mathematics and economics, I moved to DC to be part of the policy world. My data skills landed me at a think tank doing public health economic research.
A few years and a master’s degree in applied economics later, I had grown dissatisfied with the slow pace and solitary nature of the research world, so I decided to pivot to data science. While spending a year learning new programming languages, I picked up teaching the LSAT part-time through Blueprint to pay the bills. I quickly realized that teaching was my favorite gig to date and went all-in.
Two years later, Blueprint had a vacancy for their LSAT academic manager position, and the combination of my teaching skills and data background landed me that opportunity. That turned out to be an inflection point in my life and my career. Since then I have been promoted twice, now helming a team that oversees instructional quality and student outcomes across all of our live online courses and tutoring programs as the director of academic operations. Though I didn’t know it at the time, acquiring varied skills and not being afraid to try something new were the keys to my eventual success.
“Acquiring varied skills and not being afraid to try something new were the keys to my eventual success.”
What makes Blueprint a unique place to work from a professional development perspective?
Blueprint is an education company to its core. Everyone who works there shares a sense of mission, and leadership foregrounds those values in our policies. While access to our courses and regular lunch-and-learn sessions provide defined opportunities to learn and grow, that potential doesn’t stop there. Being at a growing company affords constant opportunities to lend a hand in an unfamiliar domain and tackle new challenges in your area of expertise. The best professional development happens on the job, being pushed and supported in equal measure to go beyond your abilities in service of a business need, and growing your talents in the process.
At Blueprint, those opportunities never end. Each week brings some new task that gives me an opportunity to level up my skills or my critical thinking. Earlier in my career, I thought I needed seminars and training courses to get to where I wanted to go. Now, just staying in my role and doing the work yields all the opportunities I need to develop and look back at my time spent with a sense of accomplishment.
How have you grown professionally at Blueprint? What skills have you learned?
When I joined Blueprint full-time I was essentially an academic. I’d done research and taught classes, but I’d never had a corporate job. OKRs, Asana, budgets, interdepartmental cooperation — a million and one things that are now second nature to me were brand new and challenging to start. Three years later, I am amazed when I look back and see how I’ve grown. I have seen the most growth in my personnel management and project management skills, necessitated by a 15-fold growth in the number of faculty members falling under my purview. Along the way I have also picked up skills in digital marketing, business analytics, technical data documentation and, crucially, the ability to communicate effectively with collaborators with different jargons, priorities and competencies.
What professional development tools and resources have you utilized?
The best learning is done on the job, and Blueprint has provided endless opportunities to push my skills as I take on new challenges at work. Of course, sink or swim is a recipe for uneven results at best, and my ability to grow to meet the needs of the moment is due in large part to the mentorship my manager provides. When I first joined Blueprint, the corpus of work produced by the predecessor in my first role provided a roadmap to follow. As I learned the role and confronted my skills deficits, tools like 15five training modules and MOOCS like Coursera helped fill those gaps. Beyond that, everyone at Blueprint has mastered some skill or knows an aspect of the business that I am less familiar with, so each meeting I’m in (and there are many!) provides an opportunity for further growth.
How are managers involved in the career development of direct reports?
Early in my career — in my very first “adult job,” actually — I was a callow recent college grad with more enthusiasm than skills. My manager was remote, and we had 15-minute check-ins once a week. Within months, that had declined to five minutes every other week. The work opportunities were there, but the support from above was missing, and my self-directed growth was more stressful and less effective than my organization and I needed.
It wasn’t until coming to Blueprint and having a fantastic manager who ensured I was always properly resourced and trained that I realized what a gift it is to have someone more senior in their career guiding you in yours. A good manager provides guidance on new tasks, sources resources and colleagues who can help and checks in frequently. They help reprioritize competing projects, bust through or navigate around roadblocks and provide the higher-level context to resolve or reframe unclear or stressful situations.
The why and the how of the work are the most challenging and most crucial things to learn, and a good manager accelerates the acquisition of the required skills and knowledge to get their team to the next level of performance.
What are you excited to accomplish next?
Blueprint is growing, so there are always new programs to set up, new systems to learn and new challenges to confront. As an edtech company, we’re of course focused on harnessing the power of AI to build the next generation of tools to help our learners succeed, and there’s an endless list of cutting-edge applications and research to learn. Our increasing focus on education for health professionals also provides an opportunity to learn new industries with high growth potential.
Other than that, my core drivers from my days as a teacher stay with me, so I’m looking forward to developing our new team members and helping them see the same growth opportunities that I’ve enjoyed at Blueprint.
