Liane Angerman is editor-in-chief for IMPACT Magazine and notes the path to getting your dream job can be unconventional and surprising.
One of my very first jobs was as a secretary, I didn’t go to university right away. I went to secretarial school in Saskatoon and one of my very first jobs was working as a receptionist for The Western Producer. I have always identified as a writer so even being in that environment was exciting for me.
I moved into another administrative environment at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and my job at that time was working and doing writing and communications documents for an assortment of professors, but I was also in a bilingual role so I started to take courses in conversational French.
I always knew that I wanted to do something different as a career. Since I had always identified as a writer, I never really had an opportunity and didn’t have the education at that time to sanction writing, and so I became a mom and a wife, but during that time I started doing business administration courses because it seemed logical.
I wanted to do more writing and I was going through a divorce around that time and started my own business. I began freelancing and working with a whole spectrum of clients, predominantly over the last 10 years doing a ton of resumes and documents and writing bios and just picking and choosing some of the interesting stuff, but deep down I had always wanted to be an editor of a written magazine, like a print magazine, so I put it out to the universe.
I eventually started working for the Oil and Gas magazine. They invited me to be a features writer, and my first assignment was to write the cover story on the Tesla and Elon Musk. They asked me to step into the associate editor role and I became more part of the structure of the magazine and sourcing contributors and dealing with the writers, I loved it.
It didn’t last long. Magazines are a really tough industry and as a publisher you have to recreate yourself as your readership and as economics present themselves. I went from there to [a] luxury lifestyle Montreal based magazine and the intention was to bring it to Calgary. It was really high end. Montreal has a very obvious foundation of luxury, but it was during the time here in Calgary that our foundation was starting to crumble.
I was tasked to be the editor of Western Canada, to start in Calgary and then get Vancouver, but that did not go very well. So I took the role at a brand new start up. I worked at that for a short while but the pay was disappointing and the work was demanding.
I knew I wanted to be an editor, so I moved back to Calgary and continued with a bunch of arms with different types of writing, published a global handbook and worked on my novel and again, continued to put out to the universe and more specifically that I would like to be the editor of a print magazine that is long standing and reliable and has a good reputation and hopefully pays better, so here I am.
As told to Monique LaBossiere. This interview has been edited and condensed.
This article is part of a series of profiles on industry professionals through the Calgary Journal. To see more like this, visit the On the Job page.
Edited by: Shelby Dechant | sdechant@cjournal.ca