You’re just about to enter the world of work for the first time. You’ve bagged some qualifications, you’ve gained some experience, and you’ve refined your resume.
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You’re a good candidate, but where should you try and find work? Would it be better to start at a resource-rich, blue-chip business, or should you hone your skills in a smaller company, where you’ll have the opportunity to quickly become a big fish in a small pond?
Five business leaders reflect on their careers and give us their best-practice tips.
1. Find an organization that suits you
Cynthia Stoddard, CIO at Adobe, started out at a big firm but says the route you take and the size of the company you work for will depend on your personality.
“It’s kind of like, do you go to a big university, or do you go to a small school? Where are you going to get the most out of it?”
Stoddard advises other professionals to think about who they are, to consider what they want from their careers, and to find an employer that offers a good jumping-off point.
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“If you crave diversity in what you do every day and some personalized attention, the way to go is to a small firm — and you’re going to learn better that way,” she says.
“But if you’re confident that you can be brought into a big company and given a laptop, a cell phone, and a cube, and maybe a partner to help you get acclimated, go for it.”
2. Explore opportunities at companies of all sizes
Alex Hibbitt, engineering director at Albelli-Photobox Group, says you’ll learn many skills at any organization. He advises up-and-coming professionals to work in both big and small firms. Where you start, however, is up to you.
“From my perspective, starting in a smaller organization and going bigger has allowed me to grow as my career has grown,” he says. “So, I think that’s generally a good approach, but people’s mileage may vary. It depends on what impact they want to have.”
Hibbitt started his career at Arts Alliance Media, which is a cinema software specialist. He was employee number 12 and learned a lot through the experience.
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“I think the one constant that’s true is change,” he says. “If you start in a small ecosystem, you can get a perspective of what change looks like — and then you can apply your knowledge in a bigger ecosystem later on in your career.”
Hibbitt says moving on to work for Albelli-Photobox Group has provided a fresh perspective of what change looks like in a bigger organization.
“Our engineering community is pushing 300 people,” he says. “Being able to navigate change through an organization that size is a different skill to navigating change in an organization of 12 people.”
3. Work for a business that provides fresh challenges
Lalo Luna, global head of strategy and insights at Heineken, is another business leader who says the size of the organization you work for at the beginning of your career isn’t the most important factor.
“It’s not about the company,” he says. “It’s more about how you exploit all the resources and all the knowledge that you have available. I think it’s about how you can be open to learning new things, how you receive feedback, and it’s about your ability to continuously learn.”
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Luna says there are no explicit rules that dictate where you’ll be happiest and most successful. While he’s risen to the top in a huge global enterprise, he knows other people who’ve struggled to achieve their aims in blue-chip firms.
“I hear a lot of stories of people who left very big companies because they weren’t happy,” he says. “They jumped into smaller companies, and they’re now very successful and more comfortable.”
Luna says the company that feels a good fit for you personally is likely to be the right place to work, regardless of size.
“It’s more about the culture, the people, your reaction, and how you can adapt yourself to business challenges.”
4. Think carefully about the people you’ll work with
Not everyone moves from one company to another. Technology Adoption Manager Robyn Furby, for example, has spent her whole career at insurance specialist NFU Mutual.
The organization was recently named a Gallup Exceptional Workplace 2023, which was the eighth consecutive year it’s received the award. It recognizes companies that concentrate on engagement and workplace culture.
Furby says NFU Mutual’s attention to workplace culture made staying in one place an easy decision.
“The people and the environment [have] always been what’s made me stay with the organization because I’ve been able to grow and learn with people who I really connect with,” she says.
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Furby says the key lesson for professionals who are thinking about where to start their careers is that the human element is critical.
“My career has grown within one place, but I’ve always learned about lots of different elements within my organization,” she says. “I think it’s all about finding the right company for you.”
5. Use your passion as a guide
Jay Meyering, senior manager for software development at CrossFit, formerly worked for tech giant Oracle and he says there are benefits to working at both small firms and their bigger counterparts.
However, working in a major enterprise means you can get exposed to some exciting things.
“The benefit of being at a big company like Oracle is there were a lot of people to learn from, and there were a lot of really smart people there and just cool things that other teams were doing,” he says. “We did a lot of knowledge sharing.”
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Yet Meyering describes his current role as his “dream job.” He started doing CrossFit 15 years ago and moved to the company three years ago, merging his hobby with his passion for development and data.
“What I love about this smaller company is that you’re exposed to so much more,” he says. “I think that helps you get a lot of breadth, and there’s almost a forcing function that says, ‘no one else can do this.’ So, I then get to jump in and learn this new thing.”
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There’s a war waging over artificial intelligence, with one side touting AI as the future, and the other arguing humans are always superior. We say, “Why not have both in your digital marketing tools?”
Artificial intelligence has become a staple across industries, streamlining tasks and boosting productivity. Even content marketing benefits from AI marketing tools.
However, despite its many benefits, AI has its limits. That’s why there needs to be a careful balance.
Learn how to use AI in content marketing and set limits to ensure you don’t compromise quality for convenience.
Key Takeaways:
- AI marketing tools work best when performing repetitive or predictable tasks.
- Use human content creators to add personal stories and unique perspectives to your content.
- Human content marketers ensure AI-generated content is accurate, unbiased, and personalized.
AI marketing tools can bolster digital marketing strategies, but they aren’t a magical cure for all marketing challenges. Here are a few ways AI can benefit content marketing.
Analyzing Large Amounts of Data
Data drives content marketing. It’s how modern marketers understand their audience, what topics customers search for, and what content is trending. Data also reveals how well content performs.
Manually analyzing data helps you see unique patterns and create new strategies. However, there’s simply too much data for people to process by themselves.
AI helps data analytics process more information to find patterns and analyze performance. Now, marketers can keep up with the growing amount of digital information.
Google has been using AI for data analytics for years already. For example, they use it to find relevant content in searches and reveal trends in Google Trends.
AI can also analyze your existing content to find new ways to optimize the content. For instance, it can scan similar content for keywords to help you remain competitive in search rankings. It can also identify improvement areas, like word count, images, and headings.
Streamlining Repetitive Tasks
While content marketing involves hours of writing and creativity, it also requires dozens of time-consuming, repetitive tasks. AI excels in repetitive environments where you can teach a tool a pattern it continues to copy.
Over half of marketers say creating content frequently boosts their ranking. However, keeping a content calendar with weekly or even daily ideas is time-consuming and mentally exhausting. AI helps marketers brainstorm to create ideas.
Image from SEMrush
Here are several ways AI can streamline your brainstorming:
- Identify content gaps among your competitors
- Input prompts into AI tools for several angles
- Research the industry and see the top trending topics and related terms
AI tools in digital marketing like Grammarly can also streamline editing by looking for common errors, giving content creators an extra level of assurance of top-quality work. Meanwhile, AI tools are transforming the ecommerce industry, enabling a seamless marketing-to-sales journey through automation.
Automating Content Scheduling
AI improves content scheduling since it allows creators to focus on research, optimization, and content creation. As creators produce content like blog posts, they can plan when it will post and forget about it.
Emails are also most effective when marketers automate them. That way, leads receive relevant email responses immediately after performing trigger actions. This keeps leads engaged.
Marketers can post on social media daily or even several times a day. Instead of remaining glued to social media, marketers can schedule posts and automatic replies until they can log on and address comments personally.
While AI has many strengths, there are several areas where human content creators and marketers are more effective than even the best AI tools. Here are some ways AI still requires human contribution.
How AI is Changing Marketing and SEO (And How to Use it in Your Business)
Creating Original Content
AI can streamline tasks like brainstorming or outlining, but humans will need to create the actual content. Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT draw from existing ideas to create content. These ideas can be outdated, repetitive, and even incorrect.
Human writers create original content from unique angles. They are authorities in their field that pull from personal experience rather than from other people’s ideas.
Google’s search algorithm also wants more original content using personal expertise and will penalize AI-generated content in searches. Only a human writer can offer true thought leadership content.
Connecting Personally with Leads
Most people can tell an AI-generated response from a personal reply. While AI aids in problem-solving and troubleshooting in customer service, marketing requires a personal touch.
Only human marketers and content creators can connect personally with leads. They can share personal stories, customized advice, and unique offers based on a customer’s individual situation. Customers respond much more positively to that personal touch.
Discerning the Best Content
There’s an old quote often attributed to Miles Kington that says, “Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”
AI may know many facts and can put together impressive content. However, correctness doesn’t mean quality.
Despite AI’s vast database of information, it often lacks wisdom and discernment. AI suggestions come from patterns according to what makes logical sense. But it doesn’t consider nuances like poor quality, biased, or outdated data. It also doesn’t note cultural climates or recent news that might impact what’s suitable for publication and what would be insensitive.
The Harvard Business Review published several instances where AI made decisions a human would not have made. For instance, an AI self-driving car hit a pedestrian because the person wasn’t walking where the AI learned they should be.
Human authors use their intuition to analyze AI suggestions and discernment to identify content opportunities that AI might miss due to a lack of reliable or consistent data.
AI works best alongside human marketers to streamline repetitive tasks and provide different ideas. But AI won’t replace marketers entirely.
Invest in quality marketing tools. Not just marketing tools that make marketing more manageable but also enhance your content marketing quality. These are AI digital marketing tools that work alongside your human content creators to create authoritative thought leadership.
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