Some hard truth
Sometimes I look at my resume and cringe. It looks like I have a case of the millennials where I can't seem to settle on any job for very long. The truth is that I've had three jobs that I stayed at for more than two years, and two of them I would have stayed at longer had it not been for company-wide layoffs. The third job is the one I hold now, and I stayed at this job because it was what I needed at the time. At the end of 2019, I had just been dumped by my live-in fiancé two weeks before our wedding and suddenly I couldn't strategize, run a digital marketing calendar, and cope with an emotionally unstable boss any longer. So, I moved. Then I needed a job that I could do with my eyes closed, and I am grateful that I found something that fit that bill and allowed me to work remotely for the worst part of COVID lockdowns. A year later, I decided I wanted to try something completely different from phone sales and settled into a job where I had a lot of time to sit and think because it didn't require the entirety of my brain. It felt nice for a while, then I started to feel less comforted and more suffocated by the lack of thinking required to do my job.
Eventually I came to a point where I wanted to use my mind at full capacity again and no longer needed to coast. I was confident in my ability to deliver results and come up with good ideas, and I couldn't wait to contribute to a team of people that dealt with ROI instead of reservations. When the time came to try and exit the hospitality industry and get back to digital marketing and software, I was made instantly aware of my irrelevance. I hadn't forgotten the twelve years of marketing, marketing sales, marketing support and digital marketing management that I had worked on, but the industry had forgotten me in the three years I spent healing myself. While I recovered from being dumped at thirty with no idea what to do and without a shared future I had imagined for years, the marketing industry grew and expanded and morphed into a TikTok-adjacent landscape that I felt excluded by.
Does this mean I can't find my way back into marketing? I certainly hope not. Once I accepted that I was suddenly an undesirable, I had a nice panic, then started taking Google-certified marketing classes and vowed to find out how much knowledge I'd lost in my convalescence. Turns out I really didn't lose anything besides assurance of my place in the industry. If my online course score means anything, I am actually in the top ninety-percent of everyone who has taken that particular Coursera class. (I needed a win, ok?) After investing sixty hours of my life towards "graduating" from various courses that all seemed to indicate that I was technically qualified for all the entry-level roles I was applying for, I surmised that it is simply easier to hire someone with no job experience but relevant educational background than hire someone who has dabbled in hospitality and organic farming for three years. The bitterness must be peeking through despite my best effort at rationalizing it away. I truly don't blame companies for choosing people who stayed the course and stuck to marketing, I just wish I didn't lose all credibility by taking a necessary detour in my professional life in order to tend to my personal life.
My goal is still the same: find a job where my creativity and energy can be put to use strategizing about marketing goals and business objectives. I want to have my days packed full of deliverables, meetings, and shared projects. I miss talking about business goals and celebrating successful campaigns and planning the next tactic to get more customers' eyes on a product that would serve them. I miss talking to people about business, and I will continue to add to my skillset until I get myself back in the marketing realm. This does not mean that I'm ungrateful for the jobs I had while I needed time to recuperate, and I know I have done good work during that time. I just know I'm capable of more and I can't wait to find a company that is willing to look past the resume and see the ideas I can contribute.