Years ago, when Kylee Pena was a video editor for documentaries, she spun golden storylines from flaxen footage. "There's not a script; you have to find the story," Pena recalls. "You're exploring the story and trying to elicit the emotion that you want from people at any given time." 

Sifting through hundreds of hours of recordings, Pena would pick out key moments and line them up to weave a narrative from a chaotic sequence of events. The work was highly focused—and highly solitary, as Pena sat alone in the editing room for 8-12 hours a day. In her years as a video editor, Pena became a master of her craft, and she began to long for new challenges.

Now, as a program manager on the Product Innovation Program Management team at Netflix, Pena's day-to-day looks completely different.

"Much of my day is spent talking to people now, which is very strange because it used to be that I didn't talk to anybody all day!"

Pena supports project and program managers across the globe, all of whom are working on different projects to support innovation at Netflix. Her constant meetings ensure that teams in widely disparate fields are all working toward the same goal, acting as the connective tissue between departments. "I'm omnipresent—in a good way!" she hastens to add, laughing. Despite the lifestyle difference between the two jobs. Pena sees them as two different ways of connecting dots, one with footage, the other with people.

Pena admits that her high-powered professional demands don't always leave her time to reflect and develop new ideas. "I'm really busy," she admits. At the Academy, Pena not only gets the opportunity to explore a new mindset, design thinking, but to make space for creativity and experiment with wilder ideas.

"If you're in this structured learning environment and you have structured mentorship and guidance, then you have this space to experiment, and it's a safe space when you can explore and incubate these ideas."

In addition to her day job, Pena runs the nonprofit Second Act Foundation, which she hopes will give other women a similar opportunity to explore and to pivot careers. Second Act aids women over thirty looking to develop STEAM skills. Pena says this demographic too often falls into a mentorship void—no longer eligible for young emerging-professional programs, yet not eligible for services targeted at established professionals.

"Maybe they explored some other career path, and now in their thirties they are seeking a different kind of stability,” she says. “Or they're seeking a higher income, they're seeking better health insurance." To Pena, STEAM is a natural career fit for these women, who bring translatable skills to a field of hyper-specialists who benefit from the new perspective.

After all, Pena is a natural example of these crossover skills. Years of finding the storyline in hours of footage in the editing room have made her an unparalleled storyteller in the business world. "Telling a story is inherent to every part of any professional life. We all have to make PowerPoint presentations, or make a pitch, or talk about ourselves in a job interview," Pena points out. 

"The better you are at designing a narrative, the more successful you'll be."

As a professional video editor for documentary film, Academy graduate student Kylee Pena learned to find the thread that wove a story from real-life events. Now, she makes those skills work for her as a program manager at Netflix.

How this student's storytelling skills supercharged their career

Subscribe to our Newsletter