airbnbgonewrong

[airbnbgonewrong]

Unexpectedly, The Next Chapter

In the digital marketing field, a lot of your career is spent bouncing from one company to another every 2-3 years. This isn’t necessarily because you don’t like the job, but agencies in the field tend to value acquisitions over loyalty. Most of the time getting promoted within takes a while and results in a small pay increase.

My goal when entering into my internship at 22 was to become a director. At the age of 30, I finally met that goal when I was hired at a large, widely known marketing conglomerate. I remember the interview vividly, interviewing with the group director who would be my manager. Conversation was very easy and smooth, and it was one of those interviews where you leave wanting the position even more. The outline of the job presented was I would have a large retail client, working with a team of 9 others, I would help build the team, and a portion of those would be my direct reports.

I was ecstatic when I received the call two weeks later that the agency wanted to offer me a position. The only thing I wasn’t ecstatic about was leaving the current agency I was at. I liked how it ran, and I liked the people there, but I knew opportunities were limited and I was ready for that next step.

The first week at my new job was a little less than expected. The company at the time was going through a growth spurt, so much in fact that I didn’t even have my own desk. It was annoying, but a growing company is a positive and we would soon move to a temporary space in the meantime. As weeks went by, I was realizing that the directors would not be involved in the hiring process for the new team, and the whole team was reporting to the group director, and the group director as a manager was overall very demeaning which was extremely discouraging. On top of that, I was given pretty remedial tasks. I’m not above anything, but I thought it was odd that the associates were virtually taskless after their onboarding. There were a handful of frustrations, but I pushed through and made the best of it throughout the months.

Two weeks ago, I was working and had a meeting put on my calendar for the afternoon titled “Sync.” Sometimes my manager would like to have 1:1s outside of the scheduled if something came up so I thought nothing of it. Shortly after hopping on the call, one of the company’s HR managers joins with my manager letting me know that even though recent performance has been good, I was essentially being asked to leave because my client did not want me on the account any longer. It seemed so wrong for them to do this, especially because this was during COVID-19, so not only was I losing my healthcare during a pandemic, but I would be unemployed during a time when employment was scarce.

Two weeks later, I’m still upset. Luckily I live with my employed partner, and I have savings. What hurts the most is that my career is so important to me, and unemployment makes me feel functionally useless. With that, I felt an odd sense of relief after the conversation with HR and my now former boss. Soon after joining the team a year ago, I remember thinking, “What now?” I realized I’ve worked so hard to get to my goal, that I never really thought about what I wanted after that. I felt stuck, and felt myself having no passion for what I was doing. I was merely going through the motions.

With that, even though employment is scarce, and I need to figure out my healthcare, I feel like this may have been a good thing. It’s the first time since starting my career that I’ve been unemployed (even when I changed jobs, I always went right from one to the other), and while challenging, I’m hopeful this presents new opportunities.

[airbnbgonewrong]