WHEN “TIME” HAPPENS: Unexpected Struggles of a Marketer

After 12 years of working in marketing and advertising, the most unexpected situation in my life happened to me.

I got some time.

As a working mom with a little kid, living away from my family, with my husband running a start-up, I couldn’t believe it. Extra time? Is this for real?

But work authorization procedures take time and sometimes there’s not much you can do to speed up the bureaucracy. At some point, you have to sit down and wait. Whether you like it or not.

Now, you have to know one thing about me. I’ve held at least one job at a time since I was 13 and suddenly I felt lost. What do you do in this kind of situation? You get some sleep, spend extra time with your kid, read a few books. You finally frame a few family pictures and organize a quick trip. Then what?

I’ve decided to take this opportunity to reevaluate my career status. I got my marketing degree over a decade ago and since then I’ve been trying to pick up knowledge on the go, squeezing chapters of articles between meetings, attending conferences while answering my client’s emails, checking trends, trying to keep my head above the water. Marketing is a fast-paced industry where recently everything changed with social media, smart phones, SEO, and it feels that technology is always two steps ahead of you.

A few brainstorms later I figured out that I crave knowledge. Education. Online, where I could study at my own pace in an organized, well thought-out, supportive environment. I tried couple of courses and I dropped all of them. Themes were out of date, programs were not student-friendly, projects too theoretical, not applicable to the real world.

Then a friend suggested Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree program and I immediately knew that was it. 3 months of practical courses, lectures on current topics, Facebook and Adwords campaigns, chapters on SEO, practicing with MailChimp, HootSuite, MOZ, HubSpot.

I was sure that the Digital Marketing Nanodegree program was going to be beneficial and a piece of cake at the same time, but I was wrong.

The program is fantastic and I enjoyed every minute of it. But life happened and it turned out I didn’t have as much time as I’d anticipated. Kids break their arms, friends need you and opportunities show up. I was struggling to find enough time to study. And if it weren’t for my mentor, I would have never completed it. She answered all my questions in the middle of the night, solved my technical glitches and supported me when my energy levels were down. The program is a real deal and it takes effort. But it’s practical, doable, well-explained, beneficial and highly supported by the Udacity team. Best career decision of 2017.

So here I am. Almost out of my extra time, catching the last course deadline. Now that I know what to do with it, I hope for some extra time in 2018 too.