Researcher, designer, entrepreneur: Finding room for all three through Digital Skills for Women+

Polina Baum-Talmor joined Digital Skills for Women+ while she was exploring what might come next professionally and beginning to turn her hand-drawn designs into a scarf business. The experience helped her build confidence in the digital world and see how her research career, creative work and entrepreneurship could fit together.

Polina had spent more than a decade building a LinkedIn profile around her academic and research career. As she started developing a business selling scarves featuring her own designs, she wasn’t sure how to introduce that creative side of herself without making it feel disconnected from everything that came before.

During a Digital Skills for Women+ session on LinkedIn, she asked whether she should create a separate profile for her business.

The answer was no. The people who knew her through her academic work could follow this part of her journey, too.

For Polina, it was a useful reframing, researcher, designer and entrepreneur did not have to be separate identities.

That advice stayed with her. She could share her creative work alongside the career she had already built, and use what she was learning to support both.

Giving her designs a chance

Polina works in research facilitation and development, helping university faculty secure funding to advance their research. Outside work, she has long enjoyed creating doodles, patterns and hand-drawn designs.

Her grandmother often encouraged her to do something with those designs. After her grandmother passed away in December 2024, Polina felt ready to follow through on that encouragement.

“I decided … this might be my sign to actually give it a real shot,” she said.

She approached the idea much as a researcher would. She sent mock-ups to friends and family, asked which designs they liked and ordered fabric samples. Her artwork became a collection of scarves, and Poli’s Creations was born.

Her first opportunity to sell them came at a work conference that offered attendees space to showcase their interests outside their jobs. The scarves arrived less than a week before the event. She sold 25.

At her next market, she sold one.

The contrast made it clear that creating a product was only part of the challenge. She still had to understand who her customers were, how to reach them, and how to make the business visible online. Around the same time, she enrolled in Digital Skills for Women+.

Learning what was possible

Polina was comfortable using technology at work, but joined Digital Skills for Women+ to challenge herself, better understand the digital world and explore skills that could support the next stage of her career. Running a new business gave her an immediate place to put those lessons into practice.

Digital Skills for Women+ is a free program that helps women and gender-diverse participants build confidence, learn about digital topics and explore opportunities in the sector. Polina valued being able to ask questions without feeling she was expected to know the answers already, and learning alongside women from different professional and personal backgrounds.

The LinkedIn session helped her think about how to present herself and her business. A digital marketing session prompted her to consider more deliberately who her customers were and how to reach them. She also learned about search engine optimization, a term she hadn’t known before the course, and started thinking about the words someone might use to search for products like hers.

She found practical uses for AI, too. Before paying for a full production run of a design, she can create visual mock-ups showing how a scarf might look on a model, draped around the neck or styled in different ways. For a small business that cannot afford endless physical samples or professional photo shoots, that gives her a way to test ideas and help customers picture the finished product.

An AI automation session also got her thinking about ways to save time on repetitive tasks, especially social media and other work that can be difficult to keep up with.

“I have my full-time job and it’s not always easy to find time to work on my passion project,” she said.

She hasn’t put every idea into use yet. Some tools cost money, and she has to choose carefully where to invest. But the program gave her a clearer sense of what is possible, which tools might be useful and where to look when she is ready for the next step.

Skills she keeps coming back to

Poli’s Creations now takes on custom designs as well. The organizers of the conference where she first sold her scarves later commissioned a design for another event, and she has also worked on a custom bandana for a retreat. What started as an experiment has opened the door to collaborations and custom projects.

Polina enjoys seeing people wear her work and share it online. She is still learning how to grow the business, but she feels more confident experimenting with digital tools, asking questions and trying approaches that are new to her.

She has stayed connected with fellow participants on LinkedIn, attended alumni events and recommended the program to other women. The community was part of the value, she was learning not only from instructors, but also from women taking the same ideas into very different careers and projects.

At home, she still has the notebook she decorated especially for the course. She returns to it when she needs to look something up about marketing or online visibility.

For Polina, that is part of what made the program useful. The notes still help even when she isn’t ready to act on an idea right away. As new questions come up, she has somewhere to start.

As she put it, the experience “plants a lot of useful seeds for the future.”