TELL US! November Member: Jessica Carter

Your Job Title and Employer: eLearning Clinical Content Developer at Institute for Functional Medicine, Owner of Core Health Nutrition & Yoga (Yoga teacher and Nutrition Educator), Adjunct Nutrition Instructor at Bemidji State University

Briefly tell us about your day-to-day work: I work daily for each of my private practice and yoga studio, as well as for IFM. My work at the private practice involves teaching yoga classes and virtual visits with clients. This work also includes administrative tasks, marketing, and project planning. In my work for IFM I do a variety of things from evidence curation to content creation to strategic planning. I also get to work with instructional design principles within curriculum development. The bulk of my work currently rests in the development of eLearning modules for our external facing content that is available for sale or part of partner work. For my adjunct position, I occasionally teach at Bemidji State University in the spring semester. This varies based on need and funds for the position.

Tell us about things you do that you find particularly interesting or motivating: I find the diversity of my work to be interesting and the yoga side of my job to be especially motivating. This has an immediate benefit and its nice to do some work in my day that can change someones mood/mindset/etc in a matter of minutes.

What has surprised you about your work? I have always found it surprising how challenging the role of the dietitian is, from defending the need for our services, to fighting for higher pay. I have also frequently been surprised by the amount of mental health support we offer. Although I have come to expect this need over the years, I am still fascinated over the crossover between mental health and eating behaviors.

What trends are you seeing in your work? In the content development space, I see a lot of individuals incorporating AI into their development process. Interestingly, I have seen it used within the evidence curation as well. In the functional medicine space, I see more demand for nutrition professionals to carry the CNS designation over the RD designation.