When you’re at primary school and asked what you want to be when you grow up; I doubt many tousle-haired five-year-olds pipe up with “I want to work in B2B tech PR!”
It wasn’t my answer. I wanted to be a nurse, then a vet, then a novelist, then a travel writer. Yet somehow I found myself interning at a B2B tech PR agency for my first foray into the world of work.
Throughout your childhood, teens and even at university, there just isn’t much conversation around jobs. It never crossed my mind that this is where I’d end up. Not least because, after university, I left to travel for close to two years. During this time I worked as a freelance travel journalist and copywriter. Alongside polishing glasses in a bar when I had to.
Before I came to work at Nelson Bostock Unlimited, I’d never really worked in an office before. I’d never much thought about PR as a career. Nobody who’d ever met me would have thought, “I know where she’s going to end up”. “She’s going to be pitching in stories on innovation in cloud-based APIs to Computer Weekly”. However, as it turns out, this job suits me more than even I realised it would.
The only way to find this out, though, is to try it and see. You’ve got to intern.
I quickly realised that I enjoyed the variety of working in PR. Building relationships with a range of different people is really enjoyable. I like drafting media pitches and writing killer bylines to persuade publications to feature our clients. I love how sociable it is too. The main criteria for success isn’t where you went to school or what your parents do, but your ability to adapt. The bottom line is, you need to develop skills where you can and see where best suits you to apply them. For me, it was running a travel blog that honed my writing skills and gave me a window into content promotion and social media.
As long as you’re curious, motivated and open to a career path that you might not have expected, you don’t need to worry about finding a great job. Often, the great job will present itself to you.