Monika Royal-Fischer built her career by helping others achieve success. She understands that sometimes, you just need a little help to get started. Monika built a strong network that led to opportunities to serve her communities and make an impact. She is the founder of the Career Closet at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont campus, a non-profit that provides students with interview-ready clothing. Recently, she accepted the position of campus director for Tech Elevator here in Cincinnati.

Interview by Abbey Bruce. Photography by Emily Palm.

Can you tell us about your career and what led you to where you are today?

I started out working in advertising and marketing, and I spent a number of years working in that space both on the agency side and the client-side. Marketing and advertising can be very volatile because you live and die by your clients, so I transitioned into recruiting and talent for the industry. Ultimately, this culminated in me moving into higher education as part of a Department of Labor grant. There, I worked with my recruiting skills to help build a program at Gateway Community College for individuals who were underemployed or unemployed who wanted to get into a new career path. I loved it; I loved working with my grant participants. They came from these really challenging situations, and I could provide the funding to train them and get them into these sustainable careers.

I stayed there through the end of my grant and because I had that experience in higher education. From there, I was able to transition to the University of Cincinnati (U.C.). I went to U.C.’s Clermont campus and took over the career center there. Most recently, I made a move to Tech Elevator. It builds on pretty much everything else I’ve already done. Tech Elevator is a company that really prides itself on its integrity and really serves the students well. So I was thrilled to make the move to a company that was so like-minded to me. I’m campus director there, I’m overseeing admissions, and I’m overseeing our pathway program, which is the career program. I get to work with our students, which I love.

How did the Career Closet start?

When I was at U.C. Clermont, as I got to know the students and the community, I saw some things that didn’t exist that students needed. Top of the list was clothing to interview – some students would be at a disadvantage in an interview because they wouldn’t be outfitted properly. And that’s terrible if you invested all this time and effort for a degree and you go to a job interview and are judged solely by what you’re wearing. I started the Career Closet as an outreach for students.

So I proposed the idea to the dean about creating a career closet for our students. They come in and receive interview-ready attire – and they keep it. He was 100% supportive of this idea. We started small and completely donation-based, you know just, “Do you have anything, good consignment quality items that you would donate?” We sorted through it; we gave away the stuff that was the 1970s and 1980s polyester.

You mean like shoulder pads and power suits?

[Laughs] In the beginning, we got some weird things, some very, very weird things. As time went on people, saw it as something that they wanted to invest in. So, eventually, the Career Closet became an initiative that people in the community were actively funding. That allowed me to buy brand new items to give to students who needed interview attire. Two very prolific donors to U.C. Clermont decided that they really believed in what we were doing, and they donated a sum of money to put their names on the Career Closet.

I’m a big fan of really and truly understanding your strengths.

All of this funding allowed us to sustain the Career Closet when we went remote in March of 2020. We a request form online for students who could not physically come to campus during that time. We evaluated their requests, fulfilled them, and had the clothing sent to their homes.

You mentioned that you are now at Tech Elevator. Is there anything you look for in students that apply to the coding program?

We look for grittiness in students who we take into the boot camp. Often, people are gamers, or they’re interested in computers – we look for people who think creatively. It sounds weird, but there really is an art and a beauty to coding. We also get a ton of musicians, and they do amazing in the program. If you were to look at our graduates, you would see many local bands represented in our graduates – that’s pretty cool.

What is the best piece of career advice that you’ve received?

I don’t even know if I would necessarily call it career advice, but it’s served me well my entire life. My grandma used to tell me, “Don’t borrow the trouble.” She was trying to say is: don’t get super worried about things that haven’t happened yet. Why are you borrowing this anxiety when you don’t even know what the outcome is going to be? You start projecting negativity, and that could very likely end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead, I stop myself and say, “Okay, that hasn’t happened, and that doesn’t necessarily have to happen. I’m smart enough to know what steps I can take to mitigate that and haul myself back from the cliff.”

What would be a good way for someone who maybe wants to learn a new skill or is hitting career burnout and wants to change pathways?

I think you want to be intentional and meaningful about it so that you’re not trying to guess what you are chasing. I’m a big fan of really and truly understanding your strengths. It might be a good time to take a dive into that, whether you do character strengths or strength finders or some kind of assessment that will at least pry open the door a little bit. My advice would be to talk to as many people as you can. One advantage to being virtual is that you can Zoom with people anywhere. Talk to people who do things you might want to do or are on career paths that you are interested in. Find out how they got there and if you are missing skills, do a little more homework to see what you need.

What do you have coming up that you are excited about?

I can tell you that one of the things I am excited to work on at Tech Elevator is diversity and inclusion. Tech Elevator has really put a stake when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion. We don’t just say that it’s a box that we will check and represent in our hires. We want it represented in our students that we recruit, and we want to make coding accessible to everybody. As part of the initiative, Tech Elevator created the Represent Tech scholarship. The Represent Tech scholarship is offered to historically underrepresented groups creating greater accessibility to careers in technology. It’ll pay for them to attend our boot camp, which is phenomenal, and I love that.

Who’s a woman that has influenced you in your life?

So many women have been influential to me. I think one of them is unfortunately no longer with us – Donna Eby. She was one of the two partners at Sanger and Eby. Donna was one of the wisest women I ever knew. She brought me in and gave me an opportunity to work for Sanger and Eby, to learn a different piece of the advertising business. She was also the one that really pushed me to apply for 40 under 40. I returned the favor when I partnered with her business partner, Lisa Sanger, to nominate her for the Advertising Club silver medal award. She was never going to give you flowery words. You always knew where you stood with her, and I appreciated that. If something was good, it was good, and if it wasn’t, she would offer criticism but tell you where you could make it better.

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Monika Royal-Fischer on Creating Careers for Others