Alexandra Levit

Alexandra Levit (born 1976) is an American writer, consultant, speaker and workplace expert. She has written six career advice books, was formerly a nationally syndicated career columnist for the Wall Street Journal, and is president of Inspiration at Work, a business and workplace consulting firm.

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

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.

Levit is president of Inspiration at Work, a business and workplace consulting firm based in Chicago that advises universities, nonprofit associations and companies. 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, Mashable, Business 2 Community and the New York Times, including a 2013 report on global business competence she wrote while living in London. 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 and NPR. She has written six career advice books, which typically draw from surveys of professionals to offer guidance on such topics as getting a desirable job, changing careers, and work habits that will help achieve success.

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 2013. 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.

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

• Money magazine's Best Online Career Expert, 2010
• Forbes magazine's Top 100 Websites for Women, 2010, 2012
• Northwestern University Emerging Leader, 2012
• Mashable's 14 Career Experts to Follow on Twitter, 2012
• Forbes magazine's Top 100 Websites For Your Career, 2013