A couple of weeks back I came across an article titled “How To Mentor Young Workers in The Remote World” on one of my favorite publications - The Atlantic.
The essay discussed the difficulties new graduates face when entering the workforce in an era dominated by Zoom and Work From Home policies, reflecting on the challenges that remote work inflict on these young workers - isolation and loneliness being some of them.
However, instead of focusing on the victims of this new system, the author directed his attention to the managers and employers, weighing in on what makes a “good” boss.
The opening paragraph read: “ A few days into one of my first jobs in public relations, I remember my manager giving me a spreadsheet and telling me to “start emailing people.” My boss sat roughly 10 feet away from me, and one day I timidly asked for some additional guidance. I remember being told to “just work it out for myself.”As someone who spent a decade zig-zagging through jobs and dabbling into a trillion different positions, crying and losing sleep over not knowing what the heck what was going on half of the time, I felt like I had never read anything more relatable.
If we erase the little guidance and structure university provided me out of the conversation, none of my employers actually took the time to teach me the job, often leaving me to figure things out on my own and forcing me to discover ingenious ways to get it done without actually knowing how to do so.
This leads me to recall my first internship. The first of many workplace let downs. It was 2011, I was a freshman in college and my love for fashion was out the roof.
Back then, I was still dreaming of a career as the Anna Wintour of my generation without knowing exactly what that even entailed.
Was it discovering the next best designer? Appearing at every fashion week and being feared by the rest of the industry or was it becoming a household name with mediocre taste?
One thing I was certain of was that, if I initially set out to become a stylist, the classroom experience during my first semester shifted my vision entirely, encouraging me to adventure out into a different, yet still intimidating, category of fashion: Public Relations.
As much as I disliked the time spent in school, sitting alongside “blonde bimbos who bought their hair extensions at the Santee Alley”, word to my entrepreneurship professor; I was hungry for “real world” experience.
For this, I took it upon myself to apply for an internship through a recruiting website called something along the lines of “FashionJobs.com" and ended up interviewing and getting a position at Karla Otto Los Angeles.
If you are not familiar with the apparel industry, Karla Otto has been an institution for decades, competing only with a few other industry leaders such as KCD and PR consulting.
As the media landscape changes, though, the firm continues to lose power struggling to keep up with the ever changing influencer sector, blogosphere and social media publications that have risen to the top in the past five years or so.
Needless to say, I was not paid a single dime for my time but who needs money when you can absorb the knowledge of bitchy industry veterans who made it a point to be rude to fit an absurd stereotype that absolutely makes no sense at all?
If you have watched The Devil Wears Prada or any other fictional tale representing the cutthroat environment of fashion, you know where this is going. I was assigned to the reception.
My day to day consisted mostly of greeting stylists and guests, bring them to their appointments and making sure their thirst was quenched by water or coffee.
Screening phone calls and using Fashion GPS - a software used to track samples - were also part of the menial tasks on my to-do list.
Before leaving for the day, I had to download the press review for each one of the brands represented by the agency. On the roster: Emilio Pucci, Marni and Givenchy. I forget the others.
The office was spacious; a white cube type institution with concrete floors, wide walls and floor to ceiling fixtures that displayed the precious garments. I was surrounded by beautiful clothing and accessories. Glamour everywhere.
What was less charming was the fact that I had to constantly dust the items and make sure they looked their best for when stylists and costume designers came in to pull for their celebrity clients.
To win the hearts of my superiors - three account managers with a thick burnt California accent and the local head honcho - on my first day, I wore a pair of black suede pumps I had bought months prior on a shopping trip.
Obviously, after learning that I had to constantly get up and run around the office, I never wore them again.
One day at the beginning of my employment as a young apprentice, the phone rang. It was THE Karla Welch.
Still a foreigner not accustomed to American accents, I understood it was somebody calling in from Tory Burch. She was looking for the PR director.
As I stop to type to recollect the memories, I can piece the scene back up right before my eyes.
After double confirming my ears weren’t failing me (obviously they were), I put Karla on hold, walked over to the director’s office and announced “Hey, there’s somebody from Tory Burch looking for you. It seemed urgent”.
Clearly confused, furrowing the perfectly manicured eyebrows that framed her piercing blue eyes, she looked at me and with an inquisitional tone said “Tory Burch?”.
Quite embarrassed as her question fumbled my uncertainty even further, I whispered “That’s what I understood”.
She walked out the room laughing, picked up the phone and, as she disappeared behind her door, cordless device in hand in her Bohemian looking ankle length sundress, went: “Karla! It’s you! The intern said it was somebody from Tory Burch. I thought they wanted to steal one of my girls!” Chuckles.
I’ll never forget how she looked at me while strutting away. It was a mix of pity and ridicule. An evil smirk, almost satisfied by my gaffe.
Back then I was a fashion fanatic, but I didn’t have the whole industry rolodex on deck. I was mortified. What about showing some empathy for a rookie just learning the ropes of a job you have been doing for years?
I completed my six month engagement with them and moved on to the next thing, without entirely understanding what had happened to me over the course of my internship because I was left to figure things out on my own.
One thing I did learn was the fact that I did not want to become the person they were: cynical, cold and deprived of compassion. My vision shifted again.
My experience with Karla Otto was the groundwork for the future of my DYI career, one full of “figure it outs” just like the author of the article on The Atlantic.
From learning how to write a professional email to endless lists of industry people, to hiring handymen tasked with repainting an office, down to crafting keynote presentations and managing high level budgets, none of my managers actually took the time to train me and set me up for success. They just expected me to know what to do despite my beginner status.
Surely they were busy, but mostly they were careless. Often, teaching me meant competition and an extracurricular activity on their already crammed schedule.
Karla Otto was not the worst of my experiences, but it was the most memorable as it changed the trajectory of my professional ambitions far away from traditional public relations.
Upon college graduation, I took my AA in Visual Communications and moved back to Italy where I remained unemployed for 6 months before enrolling into an even more gruesome job in event planning.
Those six months were filled with loneliness, self-doubt and an unstoppable desire to start my ascension to the peak of the fashion world.
Little did I know I was looking for fulfillment in all the wrong places (Read my Thoughts About Motivation for insights on what keeps me going nowadays).
After jumping the gun on the event planning job and landing a position at few others apparel companies where I reinforced my talent for “winging it”, I entered the pearly gates of Nike, savoring my first slice of the corporate world cake.
Immediately, I was thrown in the pit. I can assure you no type of business course, Bachelor degree or PHD can prepare you for multinational company slang.
Aside from the weird hierarchical rules self-imposed by local, then regional, then global managers, trying to catch up with the endless acronyms part of the company’s dictionary was like trying your luck at a crosswords in a language you don’t speak a word of. People just assumed I knew the definitions.
NRG, NTC, NRC.. so many letters that meant absolutely nothing for me, but everybody looked so confident spitting out these senseless terms that I was afraid to ask. Google and sub-threads helped me through it.
Later, learned that the corporate world is full of daunting acronyms that nobody trained me for.
KPIs, ROAs, ROI.. why not just spell it out?
Surely, being thrown in the figurative jungle of fashion forced me to amplify my intuition and become an expert at bullshitting my way through life at every level, but ten years into this and I am still longing for a mentor.
Having somebody to turn to for guidance in those times full of despair would have saved me the years spent jumping from job to job without knowing exactly what I was looking for.
And, who knows, maybe now I would be a successful novelist with a show on Netflix.
But don’t worry. This is not the origin of my villain story. Actually quite the opposite.
Those anguish filled, chaotic years triggered a sense of duty in me. A duty for helping young creatives navigate the industry and find the right path to walk on, making them aware of the ugly turns and complicated feelings that running aimlessly through the professional world can generate.
I wanted them to know the brutal truth behind being a creative individual and simultaneously hold space for disillusioned conversation - something that universities often lack.
This need to pass down what I learned and save others from constantly falling victim to impostor syndrome eventually led me to channeling my calling in the form of what I baptized as a mentorship circle.
Last October I naively posted an ad on my Instagram stories offering “free advice” on how to make it through the industry.
The response was overwhelming. Over 40 people “applied” to be part of my makeshift crash course on “how not to feel like a complete failure at all times”.
Amongst the people I was able to audit, the problem was the same: uncertainty, lack of access to industry contacts and honest advice on what to do next. Feedback was what most of them craved.
All of my students exceeded at what they do; photography, graphic design, storytelling. I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of talent these young guns had.
The only thing they lacked was confidence in their work and answers on how to take it to the next level and become professionals.
This project took me back ten years. When I, too, was a 21 year old fresh graduate desperate for validation and answers. A naive, young adult ready to break the world yet so unsure of what the future could look like.
Through the sessions, I discovered that the closed gates I encountered at the incipit of my career were still closed for most to this day.
The absence of openness and mentorship, or simple desire to prop the next generation up still reigns supreme in the industry and while I know most of the closure comes from the fear of being dethroned, I was appalled to learn how little resources the academic world offers to students.
Knowing I could help them walk away from the session with a confidence boost was extremely rewarding and fulfilling, it made me reconsider my own practices and radicalized my ideals on access even further.
The exchange between me and these young creatives reiterated the need for transparency and open discourse and most of all, a reform of an industry that predates on fresh talent without providing the tools to keep going.
Their sincere gratefulness was refreshing, yet it sparked an interrogation: why are my peers so afraid to share resources and to lend a hand to those who need it the most?
https://www.itsnicethat.com/news/if-you-could-jobs-180222
Pertinent!
I've been doing this FOR 21 years. A lot of those feelings, uneasiness and ambiguity never really goes away.
My boss' boss messaged me that she wanted to talk yesterday. I started freaking out about what I might have done wrong.
Turns out she was giving me a bonus. Oops.