Student Spotlight: Unexpected Opportunities Lead to Success: One Student’s Career Journey
In the world of consulting, no two days look the same. Kelsey Engbrecht (MIIPS Online ‘25) understands this better than most.
By Kaitlyn Stossel
Kelsey Engbrecht didn’t always know what direction she wanted to take her career.
After graduating from Luther College with a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies, Engbrecht was sure that her career would go in the direction of public relations, internal communications, or another related field. As most new graduates do, she applied for a plethora of positions and took interviews wherever she could get a bite.
After applying for an event planning position at a software company, Enbrecht belived that the interview went well. When she heard back from the company, the employer said something that she was never expecting: that she would be better suited in a quality assurance role.
“I laughed, because I hadn’t studied anything related to computer science,” said Engbrecht . “I figured I would do the interview and see what the job would look like, and I ended up really liking it. I found that my communication skills were used a lot in terms of writing clear and effective test cases, giving developers feedback, and describing bug issues accurately.”
Within a year of obtaining that job position, Engbrecht was a Quality Assurance team lead, managing a team of other software testers and leading a course on effective communication for other team leads across the organization.
Engbrecht eventually moved out of that role and acquired a position at TASC (Total Administrative Services Corporation) as a Senior Quality Assurance Tester, and very quickly became a Senior Business Analyst.
“I found that I really liked being sort of an intermediary between business and technology, and serving as a translator in both those directions. Ever since, I’ve been staying on that career path. I got certified as a product owner and I’ve been serving as a Scrum product owner for about three years now,” Engbrecht said.
It was in the time between this job and the next that Engbrecht decided to go back to school to get her Master’s degree through the MIIPS (Master of Integrated Innovation for Products and Services) program. She had recently been passed over for a dream job and decided that she wanted something on her resume that would make her more marketable.Advice for MIIPS Online Students
"Keep an open mind. I find myself split between thinking about the program as it applies to my current situation versus staying open to the value it can have in an unknown future for myself. If you take your current job into perspective too much as you're in the program, you can miss some things that you might not have thought about in depth. For example, I don’t have plans to launch a product of my own, but in five years, who knows? I may not get nearly as much out of the program if I'm not keeping a very open mind."“I started thinking about what I could have had on my resume that would have helped me get that dream job, so I started looking through graduate programs. The MIIPS program combines the business, technology, and user experience skills you need as a product manager, and that felt like exactly the thing I needed.”
In February of this year, Engbrecht decided to take a step into consulting as a Senior Manager at Baker Tilly Digital, the digital solutions practice of leading advisory CPA firm Baker Tilly. Baker Tilly Digital combines strategic industry insight and advanced technical expertise to uncover and solve digital transformation challenges.
Engbrecht works daily to organize a backlog of software requirements, which includes making sure that everything is in priority order, adding new requests from stakeholders, and fixing bugs. She ensures the development team understands the product vision, and she frequently collaborates with stakeholders to ensure that they have an understanding of where the software build is at with full transparency.
Balancing a demanding job while completing a master’s program is rarely an easy thing to do, but Engbrecht has found a way to manage it.
“I think the most important thing I’ve learned is how to advocate for myself with both my professors and my managers at work. It’s hard to ask for help in that way sometimes, but I have found that by connecting your manager with why you’re doing the program, it highlights the value it’s going to bring to everybody involved, and they are happy to help you,” said Engbrecht.