Jenna Schoettker is a senior accreditation specialist at A2LA and has been in the industry for a long time. She's been working with Quality on a few different projects.

Michelle: So, just to give our listeners a little background, could you tell us a little bit about your career and where you are today?

Jenna: Absolutely. So, my background is mainly in mathematics. I started my undergraduate getting a BS in mathematics and ended up, a little bit around that time, doing some biochemical work, and then eventually transitioned more into the quality side when I started working at A2LA.

I've been there about nine-and-a-half years, focused mainly on calibration laboratories, but over my time, I've started to become integrated with more laboratories on the testing side, whether it's mechanical testing, weathering testing, chemical testing, or even further along in my career, folks like reference material producers and proficiency testing providers. So, I've gotten a good gambit of different industries that my career has touched upon so far, which has definitely been beneficial in the different work that I do because a lot of times when you're integrating and working with folks, having that real world experience and those dialogues and those backgrounds really do help solidify certain points as well as connect folks.

And throughout that time, I've been doing contractor training for A2LA's preferred vendor, AWPT, for a good eight of those years, teaching on a lot of different concepts. Not only is there the calibration background, but there's a lot of educational resource background as well.

Michelle: It's so important to have a good teacher and educator for training. So that's great. I know one of the areas you work on a lot is risk management. And I've seen, saw you've seen courses on that. What do you think quality professionals should know about risk management? Is there something you think just in general?

Jenna: I think risk is one of those things that is a little nuanced. I think at the beginning when we first think of a word like risk, we have this tendency to oversimplify things and look at it through a negative lens. I think a lot of times when I'm discussing risk with folks, they think, oh, this is a bad thing. But if you think about it, risk and opportunities are just two different sides of the same coin. There's a potential with cause and effect that, hey, whatever I do, there's going to be consequences to it. Whether they're positive or negative really comes down to how I approach it, how I think about the scenarios and the different variables coming in. But we take that concept of risk that we probably learned at a very young age and we start applying it at a higher-level understanding to figure out, what really are risks? What risks matter to me? And what risks really matter to my company and consumers? Because a lot of these risks, there are shared attributes. There's aspects that can impact me as someone working within an organization. There's impacts that could impact my customers as well, and even their customers down the line.

So, there's a lot of that we have to spend thinking about, scenarios and how risks might come up.