Staying relevant (or what I’ve learned over the past 3 years)
I have lots of things going for me and I count my blessings every night when I go to bed. There’s the fact that I’m relatively healthy (never a something to be taken for granted); I have three great kids (also healthy); my 80+ year old mother is kickin’ it and I have some really great friends. And on any given day, I’m probably more happy than not happy. All-in-all, I don’t have it bad at all.
That being say, in the last three years, I’ve been laid off twice. There wasn’t “fault” on either side, HP has had King Kong sized layoffs for the past decade, and I made it through at least 7 of them. The other company, it was a matter of product timelines, development costs, and needing to re-focus on core (and my job was to about leading “new”).
I’ve always prided myself on staying up on trends — I’ve worked in technology all my career, which means change is just part of the game. When marketing was being affected by technology, I stayed upon on those changes also. Marketing Automation, in all it’s various forms, has provided up with multiple whirlwinds (tornadoes actually) of new tech, new tools, new ways to get our messages out there — all with their own language and underlying processes.
For the most part, I’ve succeeded in keep pace, and keeping my skillset relevant to needs and requirements of being a marketing professional in the digital age.
BUT, it’s not easy. It takes time to learn, and when you’re learning, for the most part, your not doing. I’ve had to relearn skills (such as HTML & CSS), become a novice again when learning Javascript, push through some personal barriers with regards to data analysis and data mining, and basically always being on the hunt for another tool or another app, to help you smooth out the rough edges.
But here’s the bit of wisdom I want to pass along, for those early in their careers, and those, like me, who even as our peer group is “winding down”, still feel the pull to learn new things …
It’s easy to try something new in our digital age and in most cases, it costs almost nothing to do it.
When I started working, PCs weren’t even a thing. And the internet didn’t show up until I was in my mid-30s. The cost associated with doing something “wrong” in my early career was huge. One misspelled word in a 4-color brochure (or worse yet, an Annual Report) would probably cost you your job. Let alone, the cost of just doing everyday things — because everything (even in the early days of PCs/computers) has some level of cost associated to it.
Today, a typo — no problem, just go out there and change it. It cost some time, and possibly it a bit of embarrassment, but nothing more. The wrong color or typeface used, not problem, just make the changes and you go on. Even something as terrible as sending thousands of emails to your customers can be overcome — just send an apology or explanation — it cost almost nothing to send an email message. And it cost only slightly more to add a digital coupon to that same email as a way to say “thanks for your patience”.
Now, we can communicate (and do communicate) with our customers through multiple channels, through social media, through articles, through advertising, through email, through video — we can put ourselves out there, in so many ways, at a fraction of the cost. And if a mistake is made, so be it, let’s use it as an excuse to communicate with them again.
So, here I am. Contracting. Working with a startup. And staying relevant every single day. It’s not easy, but like I said — I more happy than not happy — and that’s not too bad.
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