Did you ever get a really good piece of career advice that you stowed away in your head for life? I want to hear it! Share it so everyone can learn and get a little better.
Well I got mine on my first job out of college. There was a tradition we had where we would all go out to lunch when it was someone’s last day. And I made it a habit to ask the last day person what their best piece of career advice was.
One time I got a piece of advice so good, it stayed with me for my entire career. He said “Bill, it doesn’t matter if your employed or not. What matters is if you are employable.”
He went on to explain that if you are constantly improving your skill set, you will always be in demand. Whereas if you have a nice job but let your skill set get stale, the next job will be challenging to find.
In a way, I thought the advice was very liberating. If you pushed yourself to have in demand skills, then it didn’t matter if you were employed or not. If you had a horrible boss you could just leave because you knew that you were employable.
Anyways, that little nugget always stayed with me. I love marketing and I love helping out SaaS and AI companies grow faster, more capital efficiently. But, wow, there are _always_ new techniques coming out every year. You really need to study and always be learning.
I remember when SEO was really becoming powerful in the early 2,000’s. There weren’t traditional classes you could take to learn it. But there were a ton of forums were people would discuss black hat techniques, white hat techniques, algorithm shifts, domain authority, back links, 409a redirects, etc….
For a couple months after work I would just immerse myself reading every forum and every article I could find. And slowly I started to really understand the algo and what was driving the SERP’s (search engine result page). I used these learnings for the B2C media sites I was working it and our traffic skyrocketed.
I feel like every year, though, there is a big new thing in marketing and growth. SEO, PLG, content marketing, freemium, ABM, personalization, influencer marketing, nurturing, social, mobile, hyper-targeting, video, AI tools, etc… And every time something new comes out, I really get excited to try to learn it. Today we have so many places to learn this stuff. Articles, forums, webinars, podcasts, conferences, Youtube, social, online courses, LinkedIn posts, chatgpt/gemini/claude, etc…. It’s really a golden age of learning.
