October 16, 2025

Dynamic career path leads Ferris State alum Donavon Shellenbarger to new role shaping Ford's high-tech future

Most people will struggle with change at some point in their lives. Donavon Shellenbarger has made a career out of embracing it with open arms.

Shellenbarger’s talent for looking — and leading — beyond the curve is a big part of what’s made him such a versatile creative professional since graduating from Ferris State University in the early 2000s.

It's also why Ford Motor Company recently hired him to lead learning and development communications for its enterprise technology department. Since joining the auto giant in February, Shellenbarger has been shaping a new team that’s helping 170,000-plus Ford employees around the world adapt to a tech landscape that’s evolving at breakneck speed.

"There's a lot of movement right now with AI and making the cars more digital, and Ford obviously wants to be on the cutting edge,” he said. “We need to help employees across the company become fluent in this technology, and with how fast things are moving that means us being in a constant learning mindset as well.”

But before Shellenbarger was creating e-learning modules, graphics, training videos, learning events, and other internal resources focused on integrating AI tech into all facets of Ford’s operations, he was an incoming first-year Ferris State student searching for his own next step.

“When I first went to Ferris, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to go to college,” Shellenbarger said. “And luckily they had just started a General Studies program that was for people like me.”

General Studies offers Ferris State students a supportive environment to explore different academic fields and career possibilities, helping them discover what they’re passionate about and gain knowledge and experience to make more informed decisions about their future.

For Shellenbarger, that process of self-discovery revealed a latent passion for visual communication that, combined with a longstanding interest in film and video, led him to enroll in the Graphic Design program at the university’s Kendall College of Art and Design.

At the time, the internet was just coming into its own. Once separate technologies and industries were beginning to bleed into one another. Shellenbarger realized early on the value of responding proactively to the sea change happening all around him.

“The internet was disrupting nearly everything, including design and print industries, and I started to notice certain career paths seemed to be converging together,” he said. “That's a lot of what led me toward graphic design, motion graphics and video, because I could see how they were all just becoming one kind of career field in a sense.”

Shellenbarger would go on to earn bachelor’s degrees in both Graphic Design and Television and Digital Media production from Ferris State. He also left with a wealth of hands-on learning experiences and a lifelong learning mindset that’s helped him develop a wide range of complementary skills — from graphic design, video production, and motion graphics to project management, creative direction, and marketing strategy — and opened countless professional doors.

“Whenever I’ve engaged a new employer, it’s always been an asset to be able to bring more to the table than what the position requires,” Shellenbarger said. “That’s helped me get a leg up in more than a few jobs.”

Like his skill set, Shellenbarger’s career has been the product of staying curious and staying in motion. He started off working as a graphic designer for a small Grand Rapids firm before moving into the video production space, settling into his first long-term role as a producer, videographer, and video editor at Charter Media in 2006.

After three years at Charter, Shellenbarger joined the video services department of Meijer for a contract stint focused on video production and motion graphics. On top of creating content, he became a conduit for connection and collaboration across the company’s internal operations, working with everyone from marketing and retail operations to human resources and c-suite execs to drive business goals with design and storytelling.

But it was Shellenbarger’s next stop at Freshwater Digital Media Partners, a Grand Rapids-based creative studio focused on digital signage solutions, where he’d start to take his leadership and creative skills to the next level.

He served as project manager, production manager, and creative director for nearly four years, strengthening the company's internal teams and processes while nurturing and managing client relationships and continuing to develop creative assets himself.

“Freshwater was where things started coming together in terms of using multiple skills on a singular project,” Shellenbarger said. “And I started to notice how the skills I’d used in making videos and graphic designs, where there’s a lot of prep and planning and storyboarding, translated well into leading teams through those kinds of projects.”

One standout project at Freshwater was helping Meijer transition its in-store televisions from a cable broadcast — which often included commercials for the company’s closest competitors — to a closed network that displayed custom Meijer marketing content, turning a potential liability into a transformative asset.

Next, Shellenbarger would return to Meijer for an extended in-house position, providing the same type of versatile creative leadership he’d honed at Freshwater. On one project, he was asked to put together a simple slide deck educating the Meijer public relations and government relations teams on an ongoing issue where pharmacy benefit managers liaising with the company were fraudulently elevating prescription drug costs.

Instead, he took a personal interest and turned his slide deck into a full-scale, research-backed exposé of the problem. The report would go on to be a key driver of new legislation in Michigan that closed the loopholes Shellenbarger and his colleagues had highlighted.

“Those kinds of projects where you actually see a larger social shift or make a difference in someone's life, they show how creativity can drive communication and change in powerful ways," he said.

During that time, Shellenbarger was also dipping a toe into entrepreneurship with Wave Signage, a company that sought to make the high-impact potential of digital signage more accessible to retailers. As partner and co-owner of the company from 2014-2018, he helped lead efforts to create custom, easy-to-use digital ad templates that were compatible with any digital signage platform on the market.

For most of his life, Shellenbarger never saw himself as a leader. But the seeds of leadership were planted in him early on through his family’s legacy of military service. His grandfather was an Air Force captain who flew search and rescue missions in World War II. His father was a Marine, and his uncle and cousin both served in the Air Force as well.

“Really, the example they set was a lot of helping other people," he said. “Watching them and hearing their stories had this osmosis effect on me when I was younger, but I didn’t realize until later those were leadership skills."

Shellenbarger would go on to enlist the Army Reserve himself straight out of high school. He served for six years, including during the first part of his college career. His own experiences combined with his family’s influence showed him that leadership wasn’t a matter of title or status, but rather something manifested through daily actions both large and small.

“I don’t think of leadership as a position – it's really an action that anyone can take,” he said. “It’s stepping up to go the extra mile. It’s having empathy for the people around you so you can understand how best to support them. It’s being willing to roll up your sleeves to work alongside others and not feeling like a task is beneath you.”

Shellenbarger’s commitment to lifelong learning flows directly from his leadership philosophy. At Meijer, and later as an instructional developer for global background screening firm Cisive, he honed his ability to create content and make connections that fostered shared understanding and strategic alignment across an organization. And prior to joining Ford, he further supercharged his video production skills as a videographer with Holland, Mich.-based 730 Eddy Studios.

Now, Shellebarger is bringing his stay-humble, stay-hungry mindset to a company and an industry where leaning into change is essential. And no matter where the trajectory of AI leads, he’s confident that human ingenuity will always have a seat at the table.

“AI is all about perfection and efficiency, but humans aren't perfect, and we don't really actually thrive in perfection,” he said. “I think our future will always be shaped by our ability to go through this continuous try, fail, learn, and adapt process that is an innately human thing.”