Vanessa Colella is the head of innovation at Citi but she does not have a banking background; when she became Chief Marketing Officer at Citi in 2010 it was her first role within a bank; previously she was a junior high science teacher and AIDS educator before joining consulting firm McKinsey in their tech and media practice; she expects unorthodox career paths like hers will become more common going forward; Colella says, “In today’s career, it’s unlikely that people are going to have a linear progression…It’s far more likely that they’re going to do lots of different things, and what they’re going to rely on is the skills that they’ve built, the perspective that they’ve built, and what they’re passionate about.” Source.