Alexandra Levit

Early life and education

Levit was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1998 with a degree in psychology.

Career

In her early career, Levit worked in New York as a public relations representative for a Long Island software company, where she felt a struggle to achieve visibility and recognition for her efforts at work. She went on to become a vice president at public relations firm Edelman, with a focus was on creating online campaigns in the early days of social media. In 2003, she decided to use her workplace experiences to write a guide for young professionals navigating the business world. The ensuing book, They Don't Teach Corporate in College, was published in 2004 and started Levit's transition into a career as a workplace consultant, speaker, columnist and author, which became her full-time profession after leaving Edelman in 2008.

In 2004, Levit founded Inspiration at Work, a business and workplace consulting firm based in Chicago that advised universities, nonprofit associations and companies. In 2017, she became a partner at PeopleResults, an organizational development firm. From 2009 to 2010, she wrote a nationally syndicated career advice column for the Wall Street Journal. She wrote The Corporate Freshman column for the Huffington Post from 2008 to 2011, and has also written for Forbes, Fortune, Business Insider, Fast Company, Mashable, Business 2 Community CityLab, and the New York Times, including a 2013 report on global business competence she wrote while living in London, and a 2016 article about artificial intelligence in the workplace. She has written six business and career books, which typically draw from surveys of professionals to offer guidance on such topics as getting a desirable job, changing careers, managing a multi-generational workforce, and work habits that will help achieve success. She writes frequently about the intersection of technology and the workplace, and consults with companies about preparing for the workplace of the future. Her advice has been featured in numerous media outlets, including the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Fast Company, Cosmopolitan, Entrepreneur, ABC News, Fox News, CBS News, NPR, Marketplace, Yahoo! Finance, Time, Vogue, New York Post and Mic.

In 2009, Levit served on the Business Roundtable's Springboard Project, which advised the Obama administration on workplace issues. The following year, she helped develop JobSTART 101, a free online course for college students and recent graduates to help them learn the necessary skills for success as entry-level employees. In 2011, she worked with the Department of Labor under the Obama administration to develop a new career-transitioning program for veterans. Also in 2011, as a member of DeVry University's Career Advisory Board, she co-founded the Career Advisory Board's Job Preparedness Indicator, an annual study of the US job market, the most recent of which was conducted in 2016. The survey is designed to track the disparity between what hiring managers say they’re looking for in candidates and the skills those candidates actually possess. She contributed to the Deloitte millennial leadership studies from 2014 through 2016. In 2016, Levit presented a five-minute Ignite-style talk on the future workplace at DisruptHR at 1871 in Chicago. In 2017, she presented a TEDx talk on the future of work in Evanston, Illinois, and spoke at South by Southwest alongside technology entrepreneur Randi Zuckerberg and DeVry University president Rob Paul.

Personal life

Levit and her husband, Stewart Shankman, a university professor of clinical psychology, reside in Chicago, Illinois with their two children.

Honors