It’s now been one month since I’ve started my first full-time job and despite my past work experience in marketing, the learning curve has been remained pretty steep.

To give you all a quick background on what I’ve done before starting with Taziki’s, I was able to get meaningful experience in marketing beforehand. The last two years at Washington College, I worked for the College Relations & Marketing office where I focused on social media, wrote stories for the site, and did some website work. This past summer I interned at a marketing agency where I worked with the digital department. I also interned at Parisi Speed School and worked on anything and everything when it came to marketing (I still do side work for them).

Alright, so a decent amount of experience in marketing had me feeling very good heading into my job with Taziki’s. Four weeks in, I can confidently say that having work experience in a particular field, like marketing, does NOT mean working for another company in that same field will be easy.

Working for corporate means I work with everyone from corporate and all of our locations. I have (and still have to) figure out who does what and everyone’s specific roles. When we run campaigns, it isn’t just one or two people involved.

We have to work with our creative team, operations, store owners, managers, tech, etc. This is something that I did not realize heading into my position. This makes it so important to understand who handles what and then develop relationships with those people.

Starting a new job has also made me reconsider how I need to be productive. My entire schedule has now changed from going to class, work, etc. to now working full-time. After a couple weeks, a groove has started to come into place where I know what I need to do and when.

I’ve had to learn how to be patient. Since we have not done any digital marketing in the past, there is nothing to work off of (which I love since I get to place those building blocks). This means that everything that is being planned and executed needs to be carefully thought out and documented. Compared to my past work experience where I would be directly guided on what to do and when I now have a more free range to make those decisions.

The big takeaway here is it really does not matter how much experience or how good you are at a specific job. Yes, that will definitely help but what is more important is what you know about the company and the actual meaning of the product and service.

I feel that this can relate to a job in any field. It’s the process of learning the organization and its values along with what that specific company offers that will help lead us all a successful start