How to Choose a Career You’ll Love In Media and Advertising – Career Security Through Thick & Thin

Often, when I ask people to describe their dream job and then to explain to me why they don’t have it now, their response is, “I have to pay the rent.” “I have kids to support.” “I need to pay off college loans.” And then I tell them the truth: “You can work with people you want to work with and make the money you want to make and pay your bills. Right now, however, you don’t know the people who will get you to the places you want to go. So let me help you find those people.”

Even people who find their dream job right out of college will find change in that job inevitable. In fact, by age forty, over 70 percent of all college graduates are in professions that no longer are related to their original academic focus. Relationships they’ve made in college, however, frequently last a lifetime. The same is true in your career.

My prescription for a lifetime of professional success is based on asking yourself the following questions:

o What types of people do I want to spend my professional lifetime with?
o What types of services could I provide to these people?

If you target your associations and build professional relationships by providing valuable services to the types of people you enjoy, you will create career equity that will see you through economic downturns, changes in your industry, downsizings, mergers, and moves. It’s not what you know, but who knows what you know that determines vocational security.

Take your skill sets and match them to an industry that is populated by the types of people you’d invite over for dinner. This approach not only can make your job more satisfying, but is beneficial because these people are the ones who will carry you through life. When we view career options through the lens of subject matter, we feel our options are limited. When we realize it’s all about the people, the world opens wide.

Jobs aren’t consistent, but people are. Imagine you can project yourself into the future and look in the rearview mirror. The one constant you will see in a lifetime full of changes would be the people you have done business with. As industries change, successful people change with them, bringing along with them the professional associations of people they can depend on and respect professionally.

I’ve seen a researcher’s pie chart showing ten different ways an employer can find someone to fill a job, including the classified ads, executive recruiters, networking meetings, and resumes sent in the mail. On this pie chart, 51 percent of the time employers say they would prefer to hire someone through the recommendation of a trusted business associate. That trusted associate of your dream employer could be your Uncle Fred, your next-door neighbor, or the father of your tennis buddy.

What does that tell you? It’s important never to abuse the confidence of friends or relatives or to behave in a way that will lead anyone to mistrust your judgment. Your future boss could be watching. For example, by getting drunk at a block party or disrespecting Uncle Fred at Thanksgiving dinner, you could be foreclosing an opportunity to be recommended for that dream job. You want to behave in such a manner that anyone who knows you would feel comfortable recommending you for a great job.

Career Security through Thick and Thin

Even if you don’t like your present job, your co-workers, who respect and recognize your worth, are valuable to you and your future. You, too, will realize your career has always been about the people. Brad Davis, vice president of sales and marketing for the Walt Disney Marketing Group, calls it the “trotline of business relationships.”

“In every job I’ve had, every position I’ve held, I’ve brought at least one person from the company I’d worked for previously,” he explained. “Sometimes I’ve brought multiple people I had worked with throughout my career. Successful businesspeople throughout their careers develop what we called in Arkansas ‘fishing with a trotline’; You spool out a line, just troll with it, keep moving along, and this line with lots of hooks in it gathers up the catch as you go about doing other things in the boat that day. You pull in the trotline. You develop relationships on your business trotline and bring them along throughout your career in different professions, different jobs, and different scenarios…You don’t go out and say, ‘I’m going to develop two protégés today.’ But over time you might have had five people who worked for you, two different clients, a person you did business with, and you mentor them and they mentor you, and you wind up supporting each other throughout your careers.”

The trotline only works if you do business with the people you like doing business with and pay attention to nurturing professional relationships by mentoring, respecting your mentors, and remembering to be a professional twenty-four hours a day.

By Kathy Aaronson

Kathy Aaronson, CEO of The Sales Athlete, Inc. a premier executive search firm specializing in media sales, marketing and management. She is the author of Selling on the Fast Track (Putnam), The Golden Apple (Wiley & Son), and Kathy Aaronson’s Guide to Compensation Negotiation (SW7, Ltd.). Clients include: La Opinion, El Diario, La Raza, La Prensa, and Impre.com. Kathy welcomes your questions at Ka***@**********te.com.