Between travel plans, organising events for her family and friends and the copious tasks she gets through in a day as LiteracyPlanet’s Global Marketing Manager, Sam Poblete loves a good to-do list, and in particular, crossing things off it!
Sometimes marketers find it difficult to explain to their family and friends exactly what they do. But for Sam, it boils down to this: “We show teachers and school leaders how amazing the LiteracyPlanet program is, so they’ll buy it for their students.”
She makes it sound rather simple. And in principle it is. But more than this, she’s a driving force behind both teacher and student user experience on the LiteracyPlanet platform, marketing programs, campaigns and communication and ensuring more and more people experience how joyful and rewarding learning literacy can be.
“Job satisfaction comes anytime I finish a project I’m working on for a long time and we see real results – kids building their literacy skills and having fun.”
For a long sufferer of the travel bug like Sam is, it’s no wonder her career has taken her to many corners of the world. Like several staff at LiteracyPlanet, Sam started as an English teacher, but then made her way into marketing roles with companies in Australia and the UK, before finding her home with LP. She jumped on the opportunity to relocate to Vancouver, Canada in 2019, which is where she is based today.
Despite being remotely based, the aspect of working here she loves the most – “The people, 100%. They are such a supportive and fun crew.”
Reflecting on how she got to this point in her career, Sam recalls an influential high school history teacher, “He taught me that learning is more than memorising and repeating – it’s really about engaging with the content. He made me want to become a teacher in the first place.”
Keen to add to the list of 26 countries she’s visited so far (having lived in four), Sam can’t wait for the world to open up once again. She has plenty of family and friends back in Australia to see, as well as new places to check off that list. She’s also planning the design of her next tattoo, which, she hints, is an homage to her love of music. In the meantime, she’s most at home enjoying a beer and playing board games with mates.
Worlds hold special meaning for Sam. She has a world to explore, and places to return to, but also works every day to make the world of literacy learning fun and accessible for all students. In this vein, it feels particularly fitting that Sam would quote a stanza from Death Cab For Cutie’s “The New Year” as words she loves to reflect on:
“I wish the world was flat like the old days
Then I could travel just by folding a map
No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways
There’d be no distance that can hold us back.”
We have the strong sense that with such purpose, Sam’s got plenty more to add to that to-do list!
