Working a hybrid technical-and-sales role early in her engineering career, Andrea kept seeing the same disconnect from both sides: technicians who couldn't get their point across, and salespeople who couldn't follow the technical side. She ended up training as a communication coach mostly to keep her own sanity intact, so she could talk to both camps in a language each side understood. Her core belief: being excellent at your subject doesn't automatically make you excellent at explaining it, and that gap changed the direction of her whole career.

Not ability. In Andrea's experience running a Women in STEM coaching program, the bigger blockers are family support (or the lack of it) and perfectionism. Many of the women she coached hadn't had the same encouragement growing up that she had, her own family is full of engineers and technicians, and plenty had absorbed the idea that any mistake, a mistranslated word, an imperfect sentence, meant they weren't cut out for the field. Her pushback: everyone makes mistakes, men included, and the sooner you make peace with that, the sooner you can just get on with the work.

Andrea doesn't Google it beforehand. Instead, she sends a short questionnaire ahead of the first call and pays attention to how it comes back: whether the answers feel "in alignment" with each other or not. She also insists on video calls over phone calls, specifically so she can watch how someone's face and posture shift in real time, and ask on the spot, "What did you think when I said that?"

Because titles are a genuine sign of respect there, serious enough that Austrians put them on their passports. Andrea's experience: colleagues "forgetting" to use her title happened to her constantly, and doing it on purpose is the actual way Austrians insult each other. A small cultural detail, but it says a lot about how differently respect gets signaled once you cross a border.

Stop thinking of your career as one lane. Andrea's Women in STEM coaching program taught her that family support matters more than people give it credit for — many of the women she coached hadn't had encouragement at home to go into a technical field, unlike Andrea herself. Her advice, for women and men alike: find people who are in your corner, build your career around your whole toolbox of interests instead of squeezing yourself into one job title, and protect your mental health while you do it. If a job makes you compromise your health to keep it, it's not the right job.