Jennifer Adams Forecasts Key Indicators for Disney

If tourism is down and security worries are up, Jennifer Cobb Adams crunches the latest data to find out what it all means for attendance and revenue at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.  The NABE member is a manager in Disney’s forecasting department.

Recent data show that international arrivals to the United States are down relative to forecast, so Adams has been working with her staff to find out why and adjust the company’s forecasts accordingly.  “Obviously, tourist destinations around the United States are concerned about how economic and security issues are impacting their competitiveness vis-a-vis other tourist destinations,” Adams said in an e-mail exchange in late January.

“One of my recent fire drills was to pull together data that we have internally with information from Global Insight, the Orlando Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries [part of the U.S. Department of Commerce], and the Orlando International Airport to revise our forecast for international arrivals visiting the Orlando area,” she said.   The Walt Disney World forecasting department has 20 people who formulate forecasts on volume and revenue for the theme parks, water parks, resort hotels, as well as merchandise and food and beverage revenue by location.

“My primary responsibility is to build and refine our forecasting models.  Right now, that means enhancing the current model we have for daily theme park attendance forecasting and building new models for our long-term attendance forecasts,” Adams said. She is restricted under a confidentiality agreement with the company from talking about the results of her work.

Telecommuting Far from Theme Park Crowds

More than 1,200 miles from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Adams manages her full-time prognostications from Albany, New York.   Her telecommuting arrangement, now in its fourth year, came about when her husband, economist James A. Adams, accepted a teaching position at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.  

On a blustery Albany day in late January day, with a high in the mid-20s, the Florida native said on the phone that there are times when Orlando sounds like a better place to be, especially on winter days when temperatures in the 70s are the norm in the Disney World area. But the telecommuting arrangement has worked well for her and she appreciates Disney’s positive approach to moving her office to New York.  

“The Walt Disney Company is quite good about having the technology set-up to allow telecommuting and remote access.  We have people working around the globe, traveling frequently--you have to have access.  While all this sounds beneficial to the telecommuter, it benefits the company as well: they get to retain skilled employees who are so hard to come by these days.  Besides, I was also on the job in New York when hurricanes shut down Walt Disney World in 2004 and 2005!” 

But there are times when she misses working in the Disney complex and having the daily personal interaction with co-workers, Adams said.  “Plus, it's Walt Disney World--the Happiest Place on Earth!  How could you NOT want to be there?”  During her roughly four years of working on site in Orlando, she said it was “quite nice to be able to go out to EPCOT after work and have dinner, to hear kids screaming on Tower of Terror as you walk to your office, and to just watch the guests have a good time.”  Adams said that she and her husband will probably return to Orlando at some point.

Adams began at Walt Disney World in January of 2000 as a senior research analyst in the company’s market research division and was promoted to manager in 2002.   “After doing this for close to seven years, I was looking for new challenges, and that's how I came to join the forecasting team,” she said.

Other Work Experience, Degrees in Economics

Immediately before joining Disney and right after completing her Ph.D. in 1996, Adams taught part-time as a visiting instructor at the University of Florida’s Economics Department.  “In late 1999, I knew I was not going to be teaching at UF in the upcoming semester, so I started looking for a job in either Orlando or Jacksonville.  As fate would have it, a recruiter hired by Walt Disney World contacted one of the UF faculty members and asked if he knew of anyone who had an economics/business/statistics background,” and he recommended Adams.

Economics is an interesting choice for Adams given that she actually did not plan for a career in the profession.  When she began her undergraduate studies at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., she planned to major in international affairs and become a foreign service officer.   “However, I quickly discovered my comparative advantage was in something more quantitative (I was better at statistics than Russian!) and after a bit of soul-searching I decided to switch my major to business.  The business, economics and public policy field allowed me to take the business classes I wanted with a mix of economics, statistics and political science/history,”  she said. 

She earned a Bachelor’s in business, economics and public policy from George Washington University, and both an MA and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Florida.

What Career Advice Would She Offer?

Asked what advice she would offer newly minted economists or students, Adams drew on her recent participation in the hiring process at Disney, where she reviewed many resumes and conducted interviews.  She wrote this advice:

1. Writing skills are important: We ask job candidates whom we are bringing in for an interview to submit a writing sample.  It is worth the effort to have something prepared before you get asked to submit--many candidates have academic papers or theses as their primary writing sample, and these are usually too long for most hiring managers to process.  Prepare a one or two-page ‘executive summary’ of the paper, clearly stating in the opening paragraph why this topic is important and what was the outcome of the research.  I learned this the hard way: when I first joined Disney, I tended to write in a very academic style--building up why this was a problem, how we were going to research it, how we collected and analyzed the data, and (20 pages later) what were the conclusions.  My boss was like ‘Hey, just put page 20 as the first page, then summarize the rest of it in two pages!’
2. Keep investing in yourself: After just getting a degree, you're probably thinking "Nooooo, no more school!"  It doesn't have to be another degree--keep up to date by joining professional organizations like NABE, ASA, etc. and attending short training seminars offered by NABE or companies like SAS Institute.  Focus on the 'soft' skills like writing, speaking and management, not just the quantitative ones.
3. I recommend reading The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins: The book addresses how to set yourself up for success in the first 90 days of your new job, whether it is with a new company or a new position within your current employer.  While the book is mainly targeted at management-level employees, I think it is useful for folks just starting out as well.
4. Keep a journal: I keep track of ideas I have regarding projects, to-do lists, and various notes about phone calls and e-mails in a journal.  I tape in quotes, e-mail messages to go along with my hand-written notes.  A journal is easy to carry around and you can jot down information whenever you need to.  It also provides some humor—you can look back and say ‘I can't believe I thought these crazy thoughts!’