I am grateful for the opportunity to have connected with Jill Wykes ’63. She is an impressive person and I realized early in our conversation, given her career as a content creator, how well suited she is for this year’s Future Ready-themed Chronicle.

After leaving Havergal, Jill studied commercial art and design at OCAD with hopes of joining an advertising agency’s art department. However, she soon  that her strengths lay in writing rather than art. The Globe & Mail offered Jill a clerical position with their display advertising team and before long, despite her lack of formal training or a journalism degree, she became the resident copywriter.

Jill seized every opportunity to learn more about the industry, improve her skills, and gain experience. At 23, she had the chance to travel to Eastern Europe on assignment with The Globe and Mail to produce a guidebook for KLM—an advertising client of the publication., This adventure is what ignited her passion for creating travel and leisure content. Since then, Jill has produced captivating content and led dynamic teams for some of Canada’s most prominent publications, navigating the rapidly changing communications landscape along the way. In 2011, she launched Wykes Communications Consulting, where she provides strategic communications advice and digital content editing services to clients across various industries.

Jill has been a communications professional for six decades now. She has experienced a complete transformation in how we develop and deliver content. It has been a shift more impactful than any Instagram algorithm update could be.

Based on my understanding of 1960s advertising culture gained exclusively from watching Mad Men, I assume that Jill’s mostly male colleagues at The Globe and Mail, and elsewhere, didn’t make it especially easy for her to climb the ranks. Not to mention that MacBooks and the World Wide Web are a far cry from typewriters and the printing press. But as I said, Jill personifies the concept of being “future ready”. Today, Jill is the Content Editor of SnowbirdAdvisor.ca, a startup that she has helped grow to 80K subscribers and which produces a monthly newsletter with a 50% open rate. Jill’s story is an inspiring example of a non-traditional career path and the importance of adaptability in the communications and content creation space.

Jill is grateful that young women today are told they can be anything and do anything—but given the nature of our conversation, she points out how this wasn’t always the message.  3, women were still being encouraged to focus their efforts on getting married, having kids, and keeping a lovely home. “Or”, rather than “and”, they could build a career.

Jill credits Havergal with being ahead of its time. She felt supported and encouraged to go her own way, not limited in what she could achieve. While Jill was building her career, she was also growing her family. She is a proud mother, wife, and grandmother, who also happens to prefer running a website and assisting clients over playing golf in her retirement.

She offered advice to younger women, some of whom may find themselves on an unexpected career path. Her advice is to dig in and make it your business to learn everything about the organization you’re a part of, or want to be a part of, at any level. Volunteer to do special projects. And if you need to learn how something works, be smart and figure it out.