Thirteen years ago I walked into my first marketing job not knowing what I was doing. Here's what I know now that I wish I'd known then.
Skills go stale faster than you think. When I started, social media marketing barely existed as a professional discipline. Marketing automation was primitive. Analytics was mostly basic campaign reporting. The tools and frameworks I learned in my first few years are largely obsolete — but the ability to learn new tools quickly, and to think about why something works rather than just what works, is what's carried me forward. The marketers who struggle are the ones who learned a specific set of tactics and stopped updating. The ones who thrive keep asking "what's changed and why."
Relationships with technical teams — data, engineering, product — are disproportionately valuable in marketing. Early in my career I treated these relationships as transactional. I needed something, I asked, they built it, I moved on. Over time I learned that the marketers who can speak technically enough to collaborate well with data and engineering get access to insights and capabilities that others don't. You don't need to code. You need to understand how the data flows, what's possible, and how to ask good questions.
Your reputation travels. This sounds cliché but in marketing, which is a relatively small world, the person you were at your first job is someone your next hiring manager may know personally. The number of times I've called someone I used to work with to ask about a candidate — or been called myself — is higher than you'd expect. Do good work, be easy to work with, and don't burn bridges. These aren't just ethical suggestions. They're strategic.
The last thing: there's no single right path. I've seen people who stayed at one company for fifteen years and built incredibly deep expertise. I've seen people who moved every two to three years and developed extraordinary breadth. Both can work. What doesn't work is staying somewhere that isn't teaching you or paying you fairly because you're waiting for something to change. Inertia is expensive.
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