Transcript
Sarah: Hello everyone, thank you for tuning in I’m with a very special guest today, this is Flo. Say hi, Flo.
Flo: Hi.
Sarah: If you don’t know who Flo is, she’s one of our Digital Marketing Managers who handles paid media. So Flo I’ve been getting quite a lot of messages from people who are asking how working in marketing is like and how working in First Pages Digital is like. So since you and I have been working at First Page for more than a year now, I think this will be a good opportunity for us to talk about the experiences we had as fresh grads who are new in the workforce. Because as anyone knows, there’s no playbook to adulting and sometimes learning from others can give you some insight. So maybe let’s start with telling me when you first started working.
Flo: So I graduated in 2014 with a marketing degree, but I started out my career in digital marketing just only five years ago. And yourself Sarah?
Sarah: Okay, I graduated four years after you did in 2018, I did my degree in history, yes, history. And I don’t know about you. But I did struggle quite a lot during my first few months into adulting not because my degree was totally not relevant to my current line of work but I think simply because of this transition from student to corporate worker, it’s so difficult. So maybe could you share a bit about how you managed to cope with this tricky transition?
Flo: Yeah, so basically, I generally coped by reading, so my first job when I found out that I had to use email as a form of communication, you know, on my everyday life, I decided to buy myself a book to help me and this is the book, so it basically talks about you know etiquette and how to respond to emails and there is other stuff in here as well
Sarah: That’s cool.
Flo: So basically it’s like a form of comfort & reference to me especially you know, when into that very tricky email or replies. So that was one help for me and then as I progressed with work and when I entered the digital marketing world, I started off as a SEO accounts manager and of course I need to know what SEO is about. So the next book I got was a crash course I guess in a week about SEO. So there’s like basic fundamental information, I guess reading up helped me understand my work score better, especially as a client manager you know, you deal with a lot of clients’ questions so reading up and you know, understanding certain models and explanation helped me explain the items or the questions that the client posed to me a lot easier and better. So as I progress of course, with accumulating all this knowledge and all these information, you know, I was able to answer the client’s questions better. So when I realised that reading a book took too long to get me the information that I need, I relied quite heavily on YouTube and of course I read up quite a lot on blog articles basically anything that I can reference online, especially when it comes to research as well. so yeah, I guess many people, you know, do their research or they’re, you know coping very differently and basically in different scope of their work. But I still believe that you know self help basically helping yourself does work. And how about Sarah, how did you cope?
Sarah: Okay, so I think I did it totally different from you, because in my experience, asking questions and being resourceful wasn’t at the top of my list at that point in time because I really didn’t know what to expect. So I think for me one of my biggest fears was just looking stupid even in school because I guess, you know, when you’re a student you’re not that concerned about being responsible for your own learning because if anything you can just ask the teacher or you know go for remedial lessons or whatever and because of this mentality, I always felt pretty self conscious about asking questions, or even looking for resources because I didn’t want to look stupid and as a new hire, I kind of expect that my employers would have certain expectations of me and starting out was probably the one of the hardest parts of the journey for me but I think eventually I realised that faking it till you make it wasn’t going to help. So I did have to bite the bullet a little bit and open my mouth and ask questions from, you know the people in my office that are seniors like yourself Flo, I’ve consulted you before about paid marketing and also being more proactive in listening to webinars and attending trainings was very helpful and reading up on blog articles. So much so that I put my knowledge into practise by writing what I learned and paraphrasing them, digesting them and putting it up on our First Page Digital blogs. I will leave a link to that in description down below and so I think starting out is definitely the hardest part, but I think there’s every need to maintain an attitude of learning which you had as a student when you’re in the workforce like reading or watching webinars or videos like this one, because I think that’s how you can find your way out of that tricky transition and thanks to the Internet, you can get your resources anywhere. So thank you so much for sharing that Flo. I think this will definitely be helpful to anyone who might be feeling a bit uncertain about starting out in any job scope. Just know that you’re not alone if you feel uncertain, and your anxiety is completely normal, because everyone starts from somewhere. So I hope that in Flo and I sharing about our experiences it does help you and gives you a better understanding of what you are in for when you joined the workforce or if you just started out. Okay, so this concludes our video about adulting so thank you Flo for sharing that we really hope this was an informative video for you and till then stay tuned for our next video take care and stay safe, bye.
Flo: Bye
