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| July 2008 Cristine Lipscomb Duckworth, '94, Goes Off the Beaten Path
Cristine Lipscomb Duckworth, '94, is a trailblazer. She was part of the first Jepson class. She started her own business in an emerging, unknown field. And in her spare time she enjoys a good, treacherous mountain bike ride off the beaten path. "I am rethinking my risk taking attitude after a treacherous ride down snowy banks, through rivers and over logs, which left me with a few scrapes and bruises recently," she joked. "Seems like it would be easier to take the conventional bike path." But Duckworth isn't kidding anyone. She has never been interested in taking the conventional path - much to the chagrin of skeptics. "I was in the first Jepson class and there were many skeptics who expressed doubt about the practical application of a leadership degree in the real world," Duckworth said. "But I think those skeptics prepared me for starting my own business in an emerging field - eLearning." Now Duckworth is the president of Intrac Design, Inc., an instructional design, training and consulting firm she started in 1998. As a training consultant, Duckworth designs, develops and manages instructor-led training and eLearning initiatives with companies all over the world. She has worked with clients in a number of fields including health care, banking, manufacturing, education, retail and telecommunications. Much of Duckworth's job is designing customized eLearning programs for companies and working with new media - a job that she says has gotten a little easier now that people are more familiar with the concept. "In the beginning of the eLearning movement, people just hearing about eLearning weren't sure what it was about," Duckworth said. "I saw it as a great opportunity and it's where I saw businesses headed." Duckworth's business used to be 90 percent instructor-led training and 10 percent eLearning. Now, she says, as more people turn to the Web for information and learning, it's the other way around. "Starting my own business has been a worthwhile risk that has been rewarding in terms of job satisfaction, financial success and, perhaps more importantly, in lifestyle flexibility," Duckworth said. But starting her own business wasn't something she had in mind when she graduated from the University of Richmond with a degree in leadership studies and a minor in English. Instead of finding a job in the United States, she decided to go teach English in rural Hungary, a country then still trying to find its way after several decades of communism. "I thought to myself: You've got this great diploma. You've got people on campus interviewing from different companies. You've got the potential for a good salary. And you're going to apply for a job making 60 cents an hour in an unstable place," she said. That decision turned out to be a good one. While she was there she created leadership development programs and became a leadership consultant for both the officials of the town government and for a local social service agency. After she returned to the U.S. one job led to another. Each time, Duckworth had to take a risk, but she knew that thanks to her Jepson education and deciding to take that initial risk of being a leadership studies major, she would be OK. "Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the School itself, I knew I would walk away with knowledge and experience that I could apply in a variety of contexts," she said. "And if it's a predictable outcome, then it's not a risk."
"I was in the first Jepson class and there were many skeptics who
expressed doubt
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Name:
Cristine Lipscomb Duckworth