From Marketing Manager to HCI Researcher: What Changed and What Didn't
I spent three years building brand identities for schools in Malawi. Now I study how people interact with AI in Finland. Here's what I've learned about how those two things are the same job.
The transition I made in 2024 — from Marketing Manager at a social enterprise in Malawi to HCI researcher at a Finnish university — looks, from the outside, like a career change. From the inside, it feels more like finding the language for something I’d already been doing.
Let me explain.
What marketing actually is
When I was Marketing Manager at Beehive Centre for Social Enterprises, the job was nominally about brand strategy, digital campaigns, and multi-platform content. And it was those things. But the actual work — the work that determined whether the campaigns worked — was understanding people.
Why do parents in a particular area choose one school over another? What information do they trust and from whom? What does “quality education” mean to someone in Lilongwe in 2022, and how do you communicate that a new school has it, when the school doesn’t have history to point to yet?
These are research questions. Qualitative, messy, people-centred research questions. I was doing informal user research long before I knew what user research was.
The brand launches I led — four schools from scratch — worked because I spent time talking to parents, to teachers, to students, before I touched a design tool or a social media platform. The grand opening worked because I understood what the community needed from it, not just what made logistical sense.
What changed when I started studying HCI
When I arrived at Tampere University and started studying Human-Computer Interaction, a few things clicked into place quickly.
The vocabulary was new. The methodology was formalised. The rigour was higher. But the fundamental activity — asking “what does this person need, what do they experience, and what gets in the way?” — was the same activity I’d been doing in a less structured way for years.
What the academic training gave me was precision. The difference between an observation and an interpretation. The difference between what someone says they want and what they actually do. The difference between a pattern and an anecdote. These distinctions matter enormously when the work is published and other people are going to build on it.
The things I brought with me
Not everything translates cleanly from commercial communications into academic research. But a few things transferred directly.
Stakeholder communication. Research findings that aren’t communicated well don’t get used. The skills I developed writing for a CEO and a board — clear, structured, action-oriented — translate directly into writing research papers that committees actually read.
Cross-cultural sensitivity. My background in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the international NGO work with IBE, gave me a perspective on technology access that a lot of HCI research doesn’t have. The work I’m doing on AI accessibility in education in low-resource settings is possible partly because I know what those settings actually look like.
Project execution. Academic environments are good at thinking. They are sometimes less good at doing. The event management skills I brought from Malawi — coordinating logistics, managing volunteers, working with sponsors, meeting deadlines — were immediately useful when we started planning Over the Barriers.
The things I had to learn
The things I had to learn were mostly about slowing down.
Commercial communications moves fast. The instinct is always toward the next thing — the next campaign, the next platform, the next audience insight. Academic research requires sitting with uncertainty for much longer, asking whether what you think you’re seeing is actually what you’re seeing, being comfortable with “I don’t know yet.”
I also had to learn to read academic literature, which is a skill people assume you have if you’re at university, but which nobody actually teaches. The ability to scan a paper for its contribution, identify its methodology, evaluate its limitations — this took me most of the first semester to develop.
Where I am now
I’m writing a thesis on how teams navigate the integration of agentic AI systems — the friction, the adaptation, the ways people push back or embrace AI that acts on their behalf.
This is a question I care about partly because of the academic framing, and partly because I watched it happen in commercial environments. The Beehive’s adoption of digital tools. The IBE’s content strategy workflows. The way organisations adapt — or don’t — to technologies that change what their work is.
The research and the practice are in conversation. I don’t think I’d be asking the questions I’m asking if I hadn’t spent three years doing the work first.
That’s the thing about non-linear careers. The transitions look like breaks. From the inside, they’re continuations.