Topic: Get personal and discuss a turning point or key moment in your professional career. Pull out a few tips for your readers to learn from you.

Early Career:

In the early stages of one’s career, one may assume that they do not like the general career path that they follow, but it may just be that they have not found their niche. Getting personal and sharing your experiences is important because you never know who you can be benefiting from or who can reach out to you to share guidance based on similar experiences. In the early days of my career, I was very unsure about what I wanted to do and was majoring in finance. I then acquired a job in sales and marketing as a luxury student and quickly fell in love and changed my studies. At this point in my career, I was focusing mainly on sales, which I found very enjoyable, and was helping out with grassroots/outreach marketing, event marketing, and creative/social media marketing. Through this, I then thought I had found my love for marketing as a whole. A turning point in my professional growth came when I realized that enjoyment in marketing is often tied to the environment, field of marketing, and industry you work in.

Furthering my Career:

Post graduation, I then had a shift in my career and acquired a job in affordable property management marketing. In marketing, there are many different types, such as digital marketing, brand marketing, creative marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, marketing analytics, etc., and at this point in my career, I was unsure of the niche I was most interested in. In this role, I was working mainly with vendors, helping with training, organization, analytics, learning about digital marketing, and working on a few creative items. I was not happy with where I was and with what I was working on in my day-to-day life. Through that, I reached out to a local business opening up near me to help out with their events and creative marketing. With my previous experience at the luxury student housing company and now this local pilates business, I was able to understand that my niche was creative marketing within luxury companies.

Tips for finding your niche: 

It is very important in the early stages of your career to try many different experiences to see which you would like to focus on when dedicating your future to it. It is also very important not to give up until you have tried different options because you do not know what opportunities you may run into by giving your career choices a second chance in a different position in the same department or in a different industry. It is important to always follow your heart because it will benefit you in the future, allowing one’s work to be strong, productive, and successful, avoiding burnout and leading to long-term career satisfaction.

Conclusion 

When employees, in this case, explore industries or different positions that align with their passion, it allows their work to become more enjoyable and meaningful to them, allowing them to grow a passion for what they do. I believe my role in affordable property management provided a shift in my career, which was beneficial in helping me realize that creative, social, event, and partnership marketing were the main areas I wanted to focus on and gain more expertise in to set me up for success in my future career. While these were the areas I would like to focus on, I do believe it is important to have and learn knowledge about other areas in marketing because a lot of the time all these areas interact with one another, so it would be beneficial to have a general understanding of those areas, which is why I am advancing my career by enrolling in an overall marketing master’s program. All in all, it is important to find your niche in marketing because it will allow you to enjoy your job, helping you stand out, build stronger skills, and increase career opportunities.