About | Beliefs | Mission | Team | History
Our Team
The Career Project isn’t about us, its about you! But since you clicked on our team page, we’ll go ahead and let you know a little about us anyway.
Jon Payne, Director
(view Jon’s blog posts)
Jon is a serial entrepreneur in the digital space, having grown his first business from his apartment bedroom to a successful 7-figure agency. After his agency was acquired, Jon then got into product development and formed a company that develops and markets a variety of niche consumer product brands. Jon’s personal mission is to help others realize meaningful and financially viable careers. He sees The Career Project as a conduit for achieving this mission.
As a small business owner, Jon has hired dozens of employees and contractors and offers a unique perspective as to what small businesses are looking for in the hiring process. He’s also a huge advocate of self-employment and believes that most professionals should explore self-employment in various capacities.
Jon graduated as the valedictorian of his undergraduate class at Towson University, and holds an MBA in Marketing from Loyola University (Maryland). He lives just outside of Charlotte, NC (US) with his wife and three children.
Heather Harper, Content Manager
(view Heather’s blog posts)
Heather is a recent graduate, who has just returned to the U.K after a few months of traveling.
Like many new graduates, Heather found deciding what career path to take difficult; finding herself toying with many ideas and struggling to know which one to choose. Due to this, Heather is passionate about helping other people, just like herself, to find their ideal career based. She wishes that she knew about The Career Project when she was deciding what career would be best suited to her and is enthusiastic about making sure others have access to such useful tools.
Heather holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology (BSc) and a master’s degree (MSc) in Organisational Psychology from the University of Manchester. Throughout her academic career, Heather’s key interest has laid in personality and how it impacts our life choices and behavior. As an undergraduate, she researched dark personality traits in relation to mental toughness for her thesis. As a postgraduate, Heather spent months researching how state-based personality expression in response to situations can impact our job satisfaction. She is based in Cambridge, U.K.
Lily Yuan, Researcher & Contributing Author
(view Lily’s blog posts)
Lily Yuan is a Toronto-based personality psychology writer and career coach. For The Career Project, Lily aims to help people all from all walks of life around the world discover their career sweet-spot with confidence.
Lily has a strong interest in how personality relates to different career options. You can find more of her work on Resume Giants, Truity, and her research blog.
Alicia Schwartz, Founder & Advisor
(view Alicia’s blog posts)
Alicia started TheCareerProject back in 2008 and it’s her blood, sweat and tears that built our initial stockpile of career profiles and got the site recognized on the interwebs. Alicia’s interests include real estate, careers (obviously) and all things internet. In addition to her advisory role for The Career Project, she also currently serves as a Founder of AddressReport, an NYC-based startup that provides background checks for any apartment or condo that you might be considering.