From classroom to boardroom: COE commencement speaker to stress the power of personal

In the new global economy, you have to be able to re-create your professional persona from scratch in order to survive – even if you’re in a traditionally secure job like teaching.

So says University of Florida alumna Elizabeth Van Ella, the teacher-turned-corporate-CEO who will deliver the address to graduating seniors at the UF College of Education’s baccalaureate commencement on Saturday, May 5.

“I think my own story suggests that if you’re a jack of all trades, you can do quite well,” Van Ella (BAE ’65) said. “Most people in the workforce today are going to have a number of careers, and you need to be able to reinvent yourself.”

Van Ella is herself a highly successful career chameleon, and her career started right here at Norman Hall.

As an undergraduate at UF, Van Ella majored in education, served as the first female captain of the UF debate team, and was a speaker for Florida Blue Key. She felt drawn to teaching — but like many teachers of the Baby Boom era, she admits she was also influenced by widespread sense that education was a “female” profession.

“Back then the assumption was still that you would marry and not necessarily have a career,” she said. “My father urged me to major in either nursing or teaching, so I’d have something to fall back on.”

Not willing to settle for a simple life in the suburbs, Van Ella used her teaching skills as a ticket to see the world – teaching at a school in Orleans, France; serving as an instructor for adult education programs on a military base in South Korea; and studying at the Universidad del Atlantico in Barranquilla, Colombia.

Soon she made a major career leap, becoming an investigative reporter for WBBM-TV in Chicago. While working in the Chicago area, she met and married James Van Ella, a former Cook County Sheriff’s Office investigator and founder of Van Ella and Associates, a private investigation firm specializing in high-level, white-collar crime investigations.

When her husband died in 1992, Elizabeth Van Ella found herself at the helm of the company – a business that had lost one of its primary assets.

“Van Ella and Associates was built largely on my husband’s investigative skills and contacts,” she said. “There was really no one who could match his ability in this area.”

So Van Ella remade the company, shifting its focus to the growing field of pre-employment background checks. She also invested heavily in information technology, foreseeing the day when “data mining” would become a standard part of any background investigation. Those changes spurred a five-fold growth in the profits of the company, which is now known as VanElla, Inc.

In addition to her work with the company, Van Ella has maintained an active intellectual life, earning a master’s degree from Lake Forest College, pursuing post-graduate studies at other institutions, and penning the prospectus of a book titled Malice in Wonderland.

Van Ella says her ability to learn and adapt was always her greatest career asset. For denizens of the 21st Century, she says, adaptability is more than an asset – it’s an essential career skill. Adaptability, she says, is something teachers need to teach, and it’s a quality teachers themselves must possess if they want to stay relevant in the classroom.

“I think it’s also important to teach for change,” she said. “My generation had a sense that there were no limits to how far we could go. Young people who are entering teaching today need to know that they can, and should, make a difference.”

Van Ella will speak at the baccalaureate commencement for the College of Education, which will be held at 9 a.m. May 5 in the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts. Graduate degrees will be conferred in a separate ceremony May 3 at 2 p.m. in the Stephen C. O’Connell Center.

Media are invited to attend. For more information, contact the News and Publications office at (352) 392-0726 ext. 266 or (352) 392-0726 ext. 274.

Students and their guests can go to https://education.ufl.edu/web/?pid=984 for more information.