“Don’t Think Your Part-Time Isn’t Important”

           

Since the beginning of my advertising adventures, I have always thought that my part time retail job would be irrelevant when moving into the advertising industry, but I was wrong. The first 6 weeks of the advertising account management program focused on consumer insights that has a great correlation to my retail experience. Consumer insights in advertising is about understanding individuals, groups, and societies’ interest and reasons for purchasing a product or service, which is then used to develop strong and engaging advertisements. I believe this highly significant component of advertising connects well to what I have experienced in retail as I have to gather data and information from my customers to develop a strong sales pitch to getting them to purchase my products.

            Apart from developing an understanding of consumerism, I have also gained some other soft skills that I are essential to our industry. These soft skills include customer service, team work, and overall work experience. During a coop info-session with Cossette and Blue Hive, the HR representatives talked about how your soft skills experiences will be evaluated as students, such as myself, do not have industry experience to discuss about in our interviews. One of these skills was customer service which demonstrates your proficiency in helping and communicating with customers. Customer service in retail is no different than serving advertising agencies clientele, as in both situations, you have to make your customer/ clients’ happy by addressing their needs. I have also learnt valuable team-working skills where I had to learn to work with both people I love and hate which your instructors will you that this will always happen in the industry. As my instructors have stressed, in this industry, you have to work as a team so my suggestion is that you better be loved by your peers or else. Finally, work experience, in any industry, just having worked for a company before demonstrates that you’ve joined the workforce before and if you’ve been with a company for a long time, that will also demonstrate loyalty as well.

            So for those of you that will be joining this program next year, don’t quit your dead end job because your skills there can easily be transferred to this program and especially with our industry.