Job consultants are calling every week. Recruiters are sending DMs on Linkedin offering you new roles in better companies with the promise of higher CTC. They are happy to help you jump from a publisher to an agency and from an agency to the client side. Sales folks get lured into some sort of a marketing role.
Is this happening to you?
You are smart enough to see that the actual role is not that hot, but the change in designation is tempting nonetheless. Also, secretly, you are thinking of it as a way out of your current, boring and repetitive job. And above it all, it feels good to be wanted. Right? But before you jump, take a closer look at these same recruiter conversations.
Are you being asked about multiple skills?
If your resume shows that you are a graphic designer, prospective employers are asking you if you can also edit videos and if you can also write copies for digital ads or social posts. Your core technical skill is just insufficient in landing you the next job. Mostly because they are already using Canva templates to create the base graphic. So they can't justify your cost, based on just that one skill.
Are you getting job offers, offering higher pay but not better work?
Typically, the job seems similar to your current one, just that you work on a bigger brand or manage a bigger team. But the core technical job skills you have are not being enhanced. Or even needed. They just want someone like you, someone who has done it in the past, to now manage a bunch of people who have the same skill.
Go over to Linkedin. Search for your core skill, then narrow it down by adding your city and your industry. Now look at some of the profiles. Notice how most of them are using the same keywords that you have. You might also notice that most of them are calling themselves experts. Just like you are.
Now look closely for the differences. Are they looking younger than you? Do most of them have fewer years of experience ? Is their description of what they do, better than your own profile? If yes, then what do you think their CTC is right now? And lastly, ask yourself if an HR person would shortlist you for the same role.
It is important to understand why all of this is happening. The big picture is this – you are in the middle of two macro boom cycles. On one side, India as a market, India as a consumption hub and India as a technology hub are all growing really fast. On the other side, India is proving to be the world’s service provider, thanks to all the software, the education levels and sheer size of working age youth.
So that is good news for you, right? Well, not so much. Think of it this way.
Technology in marketing, media and almost all digital domains is not just playing a larger role today. It is also taking over some of the roles that people were doing some time ago. Tech is making a lot of work-related skills easier to adopt. It is allowing people with lesser experience (and probably lesser smarts than you) to do the same jobs that you are capable of.
For example, you don’t really need too many media planners anymore. What you need are campaign managers. Lots of them.. Once the campaigns are set up, the amount of interventions they need is much much lower than what it was say, three years ago.
Similarly, if you work for a digital publisher, life is different now. Until a few years ago, there was a whole team that worked on finding the right content topics to attract eyeballs. They were needed to write the actual content, figure a catchy (aka click-baity) headline and publish it at the right time based on their experience and their gut. Today, you have crawlers that tell you what to write about, recommendation engines that suggest what content body works best and tools that throw up the most hook-y headlines.
In management jargon, it is diminishing the value of your technical skill simply by making it more available to others with lower or inferior skill sets.
In simple English, the tools you use to do your job are getting smarter. And they are making your skills less valued and less relevant.
This sounds like a tough spot to be in, this early in your career. But I would also bet that there is a lot that you can do to improve your own situation. After all, you have come this far, this quickly in a chaotic, volatile industry. Add to that the fact that your education did not really prepare for this career and yet you have made it this far.
There are multiple strategies that can aid career growth in this phase. A lot of it will depend on how you see your situation and what you are willing to do for it. The India story remains strong and it will continue to create opportunities for those who are smart enough to understand and leverage it. In the next part, we will run through ways of ensuring that you can ride this Indian digital growth wave to your advantage.
In the meantime, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to share your perspectives or your queries with me on Linkedin and Twitter.
All the best for a brighter tomorrow!
(Dr. Aditya Save consults companies on business growth and is an executive coach to several CXOs. He is deeply passionate about the digital industry.)
