Ep 58: Marketing Career Transitions

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Ep 58: Marketing Career Transitions Podcast and Video Descriptions

[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]

Dave Dougherty: All right. Welcome to the latest episode of Enterprise and Minds. Excited to have everybody on today. We are going to do a bit of, a different one from our kind of normal back and forth. It's going to be a lot of our normal back and forth, so you don't have to be worried.

Career Planning Insights from Joe Pulitz and Robert Rose

Dave Dougherty: But I am a big fan of the content marketing podcast from Joe Pulitz and Robert Rose called this Old Marketing and on one of their most recent episodes or episodes in July, I should say they talked about how your personal plan or your plan B might have to be your plan A now. And I'll let Alex summarize it and lead it in. because he does a better job of that than I do. But it did, it was something that really resonated with me and it's something that we've talked about before. So yeah.

Alex kicks off.

Alex Pokorny: Sure. It talks about career and it was focused like on mid-level career individuals, kind of mid career. So if you're in your, even your twenties, but thirties and forties, this is especially relevant to you. But even if you're older than that, you're still affected by this.

And that's basically is.

The Changing Job Market and Career Perception

Alex Pokorny: The rapidly changing job market and how job application process and networking and finding that next role has significantly changed in the last, let's say, five to 10 years especially, and it's going to continue to change. So things because of that. Change the way that you then have to perceive your career and how you perceive how you're going to basically continue this career lifestyle basically from one company to the next.

And this is outside of that podcast and we'll hit that topic.

Job Market Statistics and Trends

Alex Pokorny: I just wanted to share a couple stats that I found that are relevant to this. And I wanted to first start with you guys guessing the first one. So this is the guessing game for these next, I've got three questions here.

If you, what's that? $1? $1 Bob one. You, there's always 1 505 0 1. Ah, you're familiar with prices, right? There's some gummy little rules around the, that one? Who didn't skip school to watch prices? Yeah, there you go.

You gotta pretend you have stomach aches more often.

Good, good. Daytime tv. Alright. Let's say you are 20 years old. You are in a probably junior level role currently. How many companies starting today will you likely work at before you retire at age 65? So you're 20 years old, you're working at one at least, and you're going to probably switch jobs a few times, switch companies a few times.

How many times do you think you're going to switch before you retire at age 65, based on current trends?

Ruthi Corcoran: 10.

Dave Dougherty: 10 different companies, like coming up, my knee jerk reaction is to say 30, and that feels high. But then you start thinking. If you only spend two years at a company, it might not be that high. So

20, I'll go 20.

Alex Pokorny: You guys are really good at this. About 13, 13 companies likely average tenure year around a junior level role in marketing. Is about two years. Once you get up to mid, you get to three, and if you're an executive four, that's it. Wow. If you're a CMO at a SaaS company, you're talking 18 months or tech or anything like that's less.

If you're in just a tech world in general and you're in marketing, cut it down by about half. If you're in agency world, this is it's focusing on in-house roles. Just add three to the numbers that I'm saying. So as a 20-year-old, instead of 13, think 16, let's say you're 30 years old. How many more companies will you work at before you retire?

Now you're a little further in your career, so you're not doing that junior level kind of quick change around two years now you're in your threes and fours. So

Dave Dougherty: how many where? I wish I was better at math.

Ruthi Corcoran: Math. Seven, eight.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Seven, eight, maybe 10. Right there. Yep. About 10 companies, nine to 10 more companies you're going to work at.

If you're 40 years old, you have about five to six more companies to work at. And let's say, let's go back to 20. How many times can you expect to be laid off if you're 20 years old? Eight.

Ruthi Corcoran: Two,

Alex Pokorny: we have a pessimist and an optimist. Can we get a realist? Three On average, you'll probably be laid off three times.

Wow. By the time you retire and even if you're in your forties, you can still expect about two more times. You're going to get laid off. So one to two, because layoffs are increasing so much. It's not oh, you skipped it. No, you're still hitting that same wall that everyone else is running after too.

Ruthi Corcoran: Did they?

Okay. I'm going to pause you quick on. The layoffs are increasing. Yeah. Did they talk at all in this article? And happy to go find other articles of. When that pickup happened and what the rate is looking are we talking like all of a sudden in the last three years, the rate of increase has gone up a lot or has it been steadily increasing, say, over the last 10 years and we're looking at a more linear

Dave Dougherty: Oh, I would bet it would be even longer than that from the nineties until now.

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: Let me get to it. I actually did look up some of those data points too.

Ruthi Corcoran: Because what I was thinking about when you're looking those up is, okay, is this specifically because of the shift we've seen with gen AI in the last couple of years, and all of a sudden companies are doing a lot of turnover, at which point, maybe we find another equilibrium here in the next few years?

Or is this something that's been progressively happening over the last, decade, two decades per Dave's comment?

Alex Pokorny: It's been increasing over time.

Ruthi Corcoran: Really

Alex Pokorny: that's it's been a steady stream of increasing where really companies have really shifted to this model of nobody stays around for 30 years, doesn't matter if you worked here 20 years, you're going to get laid off and turn around.

That, that kind of economic shift to that company finance shift is really what's hitting this because it's basically all wage and salary. US workers dropped from 4.1 years in 2022. That's only a few years to 3.9 in 2024, and it's. The lowest that's been basically, and it's just continuing that way. Digital marketing can sometimes have a 10 year of basically back of in 2022, around 4.8, but now we're down to 4.1.

So it actually dropped quite a bit in just a couple of years. And then the other one was. Among marketing teams. Those data points were basically across the United States based on Bureau of Labor Statistics. So that's a really broad base. Anybody who's basically has a salary job is, those are the numbers.

But for marketing because digital marketing, I swear, gets hit more frequently and there's certain roles that, get hit pretty frequently.

Ruthi Corcoran: Your episode on is digital marketing luxury Good.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good callback. Go. Go to that episode after this one.

Alex Pokorny: It's required people, it's not a luxury anymore.

Among marketing teams, 85% of leaders reported layoffs in the last two years, particularly in digital marketing with 31% of roles being impacted based on a survey from Harvard Business Review. So digital marketing especially does get hit pretty hard, but CMOs. Still are only talking about four years, doesn't matter.

There are certain companies healthcare is slower. You have a longer tenure there. And as you get higher up, you get a longer tenure. If you're in startups or agencies or tech companies, SA companies, anything like that, the tenures very short. But the numbers don't really change that much.

You're still talking four years, it doesn't matter. So what the company that you are working at right now is a paragraph on your resume. Because it is soon going to be that you work from here, from this date to this date, and now you work someplace else. And you can expect to work at 13 more companies, 10 more companies, five or six more companies.

It doesn't matter. That trend basically continues, is it's now this broken system getting back to what the core of the podcast was about. You no longer have this straight line, this straight shot from, I graduated from college. I get my junior level job. I worked that for a couple years. I get my med job. I worked that for a couple years.

I get my senior job. I worked that for, you just, you keep on one train, one track, and you're moving just up. And the long, the problem is now is these roles are so short and the new jobs and number of companies is so frequent. In so many, it's very broken up now. So you're zigging and zagging constantly.

So basically it's how do you find some source of security and what's your where do you focus your stability off of to make sure that you can get that next job? Because let's say you laid off three times, that means you're doing a good job and you got fired. How broken of a system is that?

Like you did a good job, you still got fired. So there's no safety, element of saying oh, I'm doing better than this person on my team. Your entire department got cut. It doesn't matter. Everybody's done. Everybody's gone. So in which case, it's no longer about you, it's around you who said,

Ruthi Corcoran: holy smokes, what can we do?

You need to be here.

Dave Dougherty: Nope. And Alex, I think this was the thing that really stood out to me on this episode, and I'll put. In for this one, it is on specific thing on the half.

The thing that really stood out to me was the, was that they said the risk profile has changed for going to college and constantly upskilling to earn that higher wage, right? You can be at that company, you can learn a whole bunch of things, and then maybe you move horizontally to another company and then learn a bunch of things.

And so long as you're developing, you're okay if if you stay stagnant, you're dead. With that. If you take the lens of the traditional sort of investing in the finance side of things, right? You need to diversify your risk. How do you do that as an individual?

The Importance of Networking and Personal Branding

Dave Dougherty: It's through your network.

And I remember for me, coming from a non-traditional job, which very much was, you either have a network of musicians or you. Don't get any gigs because you're constantly fighting. Or if you don't know the promoter of a certain club, you're just not getting in. So you take all those random jobs to get to know people so that you can be within the community and have a higher chance of, getting a gig.

I took that mindset in and I remember, I think I told the story before, but I remember going to my first industry conference. It was at the Men's search convention. And like any conference you have the opening day keynote and the big auditorium. And I remember walking in, and this could just be my own sort of like competition problems, but I remember standing in the doorway seeing 1200 people sitting in the auditorium going.

Every single one of these people is my competition right now. I can see Ruthi shaking her head. If you're watching the YouTube thing it's worth, seeing that expression. But for me it really was this like, oh my God, I really am competing against everybody else who says they're an SEO, or who says they're a digital marketer who has some kind of whatever.

And then as the rest of the day went. On. There were certain things where I'm like, oh, okay. You know what? This group of people, I don't really have to worry about competing with them because they're on this different path. Like they're more IT related technical SEO than the business creative side, right?

That's going to be where my specialty is. But differentiating yourself with all the structural changes with AI coming up and with people being let go and then. AI being used in the application process and I think it is reverting back to who you know, who you're getting lunch with, who you can reach out to.

All of the interesting things that have happened to me recently is purely because somebody knew me or somebody knew one of my friends. So I was a safe person to reach out to, and then we grabbed a coffee and started talking. And that's allowed me to get some insights into how things are going at other places.

And again, build out that network of people who can ask questions of each other while we try to make our day jobs as good as they can be.

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah, I think about that. And I shake my head at your competition comment. Just simply be, because we have such a different way of looking at the world around this, and I very much enjoy the juxtaposition. Some of the thoughts that were coming to mind as you were describing this. First, I'm digesting the information you provided, which is, that's quite startling.

That's a huge turnover. It. I am still very far from that mindset. I would say this idea that we're going to have, how many did you say? I'm still going to have seven to eight more companies in my career. Is surprising. I don't think about my career tra trajectory in that way. But I don't doubt on the average that's the case, and I'm certainly going to have a number of additional companies that I work for.

The layoff number I think is also somewhat startling of, when you're 40, you can still expect to have two more layoffs. That's something to think about how dynamic our work lives might be. By, to your point, no out of our control. We might be doing everything right and still have some major curve balls thrown our way.

And so how do you position yourself for that? Three different tangents off of this. So the first one is, if I put my economics hat on, I go, okay, so wages are sticky, possibly. Organizational inertia. So like the way that companies do things, that's very sticky. And so maybe the reason that we see layoffs increasing over time is because the companies leaders of companies, management, professors, et cetera, have discovered layoffs is one way in which you can get out of that organizational inertia. If you've gotta make a big change, it takes longer perhaps to do a bunch of organizational switch up than it does to lay people off resource, reallocation, et cetera. And that just for me anyways, putting it, understanding the logic behind it or the reason behind it, whether or not that's a good reason, bad reason, we're talking morally neutral. But it helps me process and go, okay, I'm understanding the dynamics of what's going on here. So that's one lens I have.

Adapting to Continuous Change and Upskilling

Ruthi Corcoran: The next one I have is, okay, what skillset sets then do I need when I'm adapting to this sort of continuous change? And I know you guys will talk a little bit about upskilling yourself and what that change is.

The first thing that came to mind for me is. One of my skills that I want to continue improving and developing is being able to connect with people and connect with teams quickly, because if there's such turnover, I don't wanna have a lot of lag time because it could be that I've got X amount of time to work with a group of people to do something cool on a given project and then we're going to move on.

And so that might be something I hadn't thought about as much before, is how quickly can I do the orient. Figure out where I am and act loop in order to move forward on a project. And then the last one I was thinking about, and feel free to pick any of these apart or run with them.

Trust and Networking in the Age of AI

Ruthi Corcoran: Is this idea of trust in what you said, Dave, about how a lot of the interesting things that have happened recently have been because of somebody, and I wonder if that only is going to increase because of the flood of information.

The flood of oh, okay. We now have access to a very different world than we did because of gen, ai. Hey, maybe that means that we are going to rely even more on the people we know because it serves as the best filtering mechanism in a world where we're flooded with information. This is just as true on the sort of resume request.

If the ability to create a resume and a very good resume increases because of LMS making it easy, then all of a sudden I need a different filtering mechanism than who has the best resume. And that falls back to who I know because that trust relationship is quite important.

Dave Dougherty: The big thing that jumps out to me and I know we've talked about.

Things like Clayton Christensen's idea of the cult, a new finance and how, paying attention to the wrong metric leads to the wrong things. Like paying attention to gross margin versus net margin and how, you end up slicing off the bottom end of your portfolio just to, spite your face.

And then you wonder why you're losing market share. because you allowed the incumbents to take the. The lower margin, higher profitability, higher volume thing while you were in search of profitability. So I think there's that issue, but then there's also, I still think there's the rippling of was it Jack Welch, the ge, CEO, who became super famous for productivity and laying people off if it just didn't work, or it wasn't going the way.

And I think there are a lot of people that. His ideas, even though they've been debunked now, are still a safer bet than having to stick your neck out and say I think we're going to have to ride through this and try to maintain staffing levels even though there's a negative transition because on the outs other side, we need to be able to hit the ground running.

It's easier to say, no, we're going to go. Go for profitability and keep the shareholders happy. And, whoever's with us is whoever's with us like that. That to me is part of the fundamental problem of the trust between the workers and the company. Where's the company's not going to hire people or, promote them because the workers aren't showing the same.

Loyalty, but the companies aren't sharing the same loyalty. So what's the incentive to show loyalty? So it's really a chicken and the egg problem, and I definitely don't have an answer. I'm throwing this out as, ideas to, to mull over. because I do think there's some structural problems with this.

And I would be interested in anybody outside of the US like what your thoughts are on this. because this feels very. Very us. Like you can get your head cut at any time, thinking. Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I think at Will employment has that negative action to it, and it's how far does that push until there's some sort of action against that?

That is the law basically. It's at will, so it's at any point you can be let go for any reason. You don't need a reason, actually. You can just be let go. Because of that, then employment becomes, very tentative. Which then there's a response to that of unions or stronger work environments, or the better work environments.

The better contracts is where people then shift to, it's not so much about invested stock or anything like that. Maybe it's about. Contract employment that's guaranteed or guaranteed pay. Dave, you and I talked about like an athlete based system where it's you're only working.

It's a very different way to think about yourself. Actually, this is a cool model because you think about yourself as a sports athlete. They have a very short career timeframe, so they're trying to make the absolute most out of it. And whatever that signing bonus deal is and whatever those guaranteed pay is because they might be injured and they might be done with their entire career in the next.

Month. So they're very aggressive about an extremely large amount of money in a very short period of time and making sure that they look like the best one. They have an agent who's constantly hammering to make the best deal for them. They've got, that was another one from a different podcast.

But talking about the moment that you have a contract that involves, equity or stock, you need an employment lawyer to look over that before you sign it. And a lot of people don't even know that you should. They sign and then suddenly. An IPO happens, and nobody knows about the giant amount of taxes or potential, weights on funds.

There, there's a lot of financial impacts that happen once you get, to these more complex agreements. But maybe that becomes a, yeah, maybe that becomes an apartment, instead of man, everybody wants an open office plan or hybrid work days. I want to guaranteed 18 month contract.

Something like that. Maybe that's a market shift that happens.

Dave Dougherty: Or if you're forcing in office, then I want, an extra 15% on the check because of the hassle of, coming in. Yeah I've been mulling with that idea for a long time. Like it originally came while I was doing my MBA, the Dan Pink, the author, if you're familiar with him, in one of his books on creativity.

He talks about the Hollywood ification of the workforce and this was over 10 years ago. So this is definitely not a new idea, but yeah, I've just been, because of the amount of sports documentaries I'm forced to watch because I can't watch what I want to with, my kid in the house. I it if you take that perspective of, okay, I'm going to do.

Three years for 400,000. That's a very different look than, here's my annual salary. It's say, okay, but for how long? For what? Then what? Yep. because if you're, yeah, you like certainty. Certainty feels nice. If you could sign a contract for three years at seven. At 750,000 with 500 of it, guaranteed, are you going to sign that contract?

Yeah, probably You can suffer for three years.

It's a very, it's a very different mindset,

Alex Pokorny: Yeah.

Strategies for Career Stability and Growth

Alex Pokorny: Getting back to Ruthi, some of your tangents that you had mentioned one of 'em in particular, like talking about. Upskilling and trust. And ai, I think that's actually combined up a bit because in times of UNC certainty, people always go back to what they know and what they trust.

So you got a fallback model, right? So I think that increases during a time where you have concerns of any kind. Doesn't really matter what situation you're in, if it's a really complex. You're buying a new house and you're signing for a mortgage. You talk to some people who you didn't think about, the month prior, but now you're thinking about them because man, this mortgage stuff is annoying and complex.

They're like those changes, you immediately fall back to those you trust. Might be a new realtor, new bank. So there's no trust there. Instead you fall back to the ones you do trust and try to pull that forward. So I think during AI shift we see that Dave, you had mentioned about, friends reaching out to you.

I just recently had some colleagues who have reached out to me about random stuff because they knew I was doing some AI stuff and they had other questions, right? They were just falling back to the ones they trust. So with job changes and job function changing with AI tools. It's going to be really hard to judge who's the best person for the job.

Who's the best GPT landing page creator? I don't know who's the best, whatever, whatever situation that might appear in the next six months or nine months, which we don't really know exactly what that's going to look like. So who do I pick? I pick somebody who's broad based enough and skilled enough and has, seems to have some interest or background in this area, and I, that's the best I got.

Which it's a lot easier for other people to try to fake it, but maybe it's a great point to entry actually into the market because you can show that you have a skill that no one else has. It's not like anybody has 10 years of chat GT expertise under their belt. Everybody's starting out fresh, so it's, the competitive market, speaking of Dave's earlier point, also has expanded in some ways too, because you're going to be competing against other people who have just started and those skills that they have are just as relevant as yours. One other random stat because this is depressing. How much time are you going to spend not desired unemployment before you retire?

Of layoffs and it's not easy to find a job. So if you're 40 years old, you can expect oh man, to not work for about a year and a half. Yeah, I was going to say three years because I was thinking you're going to go 20. Yeah. Kind

Dave Dougherty: sabbatical.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. You got a couple of layoffs means, and it's more senior level role means you might be doing six to 12 months to find the next job.

So thinking also about that diversification of finances and other rest. You don't have a solid career from now to then till 65. You also don't have a solidly increasing career. You're probably going to take some horizontal or even some slight negatives roles just to keep working or find the better role, the better fit, and keep on going.

Hopefully that is the only enforced, unin, not unintentional kind of unemployment. But if you're switching jobs and you're moving things around and roles are shifting all the rest too, then hopefully you have more seamless employment because you're moving from one company to the next during the period of time.

So it also puts a little pressure on those who wanna stick around. Myself, I'd even include in that bucket to try to stick around with one company, you're going to start hitting that 10 year number pretty fast too. There's. Risk to not moving to. But let's get to solving this some actions on this.

And that podcast went into a lot of that. So let's Ruth, I'm going to skip one or two of your tangents, but I'm going to try shift us into that conversation of how do you create that? And one of the most telling phrases outta this that hit me the hardest was your audience is your network.

And that's a shift in mindset for me. I always think of network as being like individuals, or random people you've added on LinkedIn, but you have an audience as well. And that was something that they were pushing a lot, was basically is discussing about what can you be passionate about and not just oh, I got laid off, now I need to start up a blog and start up a website and start doing things.

Oh, I got hired, I'm going to stop everything. Start and stop. Start and stop. Are you really going to create an audience or a base, a consistent, solid base that you can rely upon basically a support network that you can rely upon during those in-between job changes? And if you're just popping here and popping there, no.

And if you're just starting it up, it's going to be small and you're going to struggle. So it puts you at a considerable disadvantage. So how do you basically maintain and create. An audience and what would that topic even be about? And how do you basically make sure that you're feeding that audience basically throughout time.

Make sure that you have that when you unexpectedly need it.

Ruthi Corcoran: And so Dave, when you were talking about diversification being particularly important and you look towards diversification of your network, it's, it ties back to this in particular, which is. Assume you're going to be laid off at least two to three times within your career, could be more, right?

That's an average. Average. So you could be more, or you could be one of the lucky ones, right? Yeah. Assume you're going to be laid off two to three times. How do you diversify your your portfolio of being able to get hired, which your resume, your LinkedIn profile, those are parts of that portfolio.

But then Alex, it sounds like one of the things they talked about or that really struck you was your audience and the people with whom your communicating, albeit in a one way fashion, they are part of that diversification.

Alex Pokorny: Correct? Exactly. And those things that you do. Have an impact as well on you being different and diversifying your own skillset as well.

More of this was more professional related and what you'd be sharing out to a network or a substack or however you wanna basically make this happen, LinkedIn, whatever it is going to be. Let's say you're really passionate about, I think they use the examples of like butterflies or something and you created like the best butterfly searching website or some random thing.

You had an interest in this and you did something about it that adds to your resume and adds kind of personal flavor to it, but also gives you an opportunity to expand in a way that your job might not allow you to. So then you have more diversified skillset and you have something of interest.

And it's also something that you can talk about that's maybe more consistent than a career and maybe all those projects that you really wanted to do. I was just talking to some about work and we're talking about implementation and, six to eight months from now. If you're looking at numbers like this, six to eight months is actually a little bit too long.

Yeah. Which means I might be doing work for the next six to eight months and then never see the fruition of it because I want to get around to see the fruition of it.

That means I don't get that on my resume. That means I don't really get that skill. I don't actually get to see, the retrospective of it, of what worked and what didn't.

I don't get to have that experience. But if that had a side thing, I could continue that. As much as I wanted or as long as I wanted. And that can contain kind of what I'm going after.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. I think the big thing for me was coming out of the creative side and like my entry into the business world was creative writing and being able to do copywriting or ghost writing.

In those particular types of jobs, there's an expectation that you have a portfolio in addition to your resume. Like they wanna see work samples, they wanna see those types of things, to prove that you actually know how to do the creative work and that the creative work is worthwhile, right?

I have leveraged that mindset even in the non. Creative marketing roles that I have. If you go to my website, you will see an entire section of case studies that I've put together on the projects that I am particularly proud of. And I'm like, I just got done writing a new one, actually, I haven't uploaded it yet.

But constantly updating that so that, if I am in a, a job interview or that particular project might be a good case study for somebody that I had a coffee with. I can send them that webpage and say here's this, here's the example that I brought up. And you can go take a look and, follow up if you want more.

Those sorts of things I think are really powerful. And I'm not actually finding a lot of other marketers who think that way. As you go along, write down the examples of the things that you're proud of and not just what you did most recently. So that would definitely be something that I would recommend for a lot of people.

But then also figure out what you wanna be known for and how do those case studies ladder up to those topics.

Ruthi Corcoran: I think what you've done is not just reflect on the projects that you're proud of or the projects that you think went particularly well, but you've taken them and you've packaged them up in a way that's shareable.

Which perhaps both of you might be. More in tune with or inclined to do because of your background doing more agency freelance. Whereas that thought would never occur to me of, oh, I need this for, I have this resume, I have this LinkedIn profile. What do you mean I need this other thing? And at the same time, I think about my aunt used to be a copywriter, slash producer and my uncle used to be a photographer and a filmmaker. And of course they had that, right? Because anytime you're going to do a job, here's my body of work, here's what I come with. And that's just part of the discourse of deciding whether or not you're going to work with somebody, especially if to your guys' point, trust becomes more important.

What other basis do you have than the suite of work that you have if you don't know somebody?

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. Trust signals.

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah.

Dave Dougherty: And I do think, if you're at the beginning of your career, like when I was talking to the students earlier earlier in the year at the college, it was and they asked like, all right, we're not super confident in the job market or the economy.

What do we do? And I said. Anything you can get your hands on, go volunteer, go, hit somebody up that's doing something that you find interesting and see if you can buy 'em a coffee or get involved somehow. Or just if you have a ton of time, but know, marketable skills. Go.

Invest some of that time. And to get those skills so that you can then have those conversations in your later interviews of, I wasn't just sitting at my my mom's couch. I was volunteering for, sheltered dogs or I had a coworker who for whatever reason got into rehabbing squirrels in a nature center, and that ended up leading to her next thing.

And you're like. That. Okay, what? But that's fantastic. But

Ruthi Corcoran: this is whole idea of you do stuff and then stuff happens. What you guys are talking about is you are just opening a bunch of doors, not all the way, but you're just opening a few of 'em and seeing which ones. And it turns out that maybe having more doors open is is now table stakes.

Dave Dougherty: And I do feel like on the opposite side of that, when you're on the older, more senior levels, there's a lot of other things that have to come into play too for a particular role. If you're going to be A-A-C-M-O of a business or even a VP of a business, do you have the particular skillset as well as the right mindset for the situation the company is in.

Because if you're a turnaround specialist and everything is fantastic, as a company, that's not the right fit for you. So you shouldn't expect to become CMO when you know when you're a turnaround specialist. You should follow the ones that are in Jurassic need of help and then. Offer your services it becomes more nuanced and you need to have a better understanding of what is it that I'm actually good at or known for?

What environments do I thrive in? And then you can go chase those

and there's benefits

Alex Pokorny: to it. You, David mentioned about what you wanna be known for. And. That can change over time, of course.

And fit what the market needs or what, how your personality changes or your interests change. But being in a niche, there is so much benefit to it.

I was just. Thinking of a guy that I know he is he's a full-time woodworker, makes actually really good money, which is tough in that industry. And how he started was he was making little coasters and he was selling them at different craft stores with, and he had a business card tucked in there and people decided, Hey, I know nobody who does woodworking.

I want a custom table. Can you do a giant dining table? Has nothing to do with a coaster, right? Woodworking skills. That is very different world. But how many woodworkers do you know? None. Yeah. So this is something, it's a potential. I was just thinking about it. There's a company an airline that I, I interned at and I like doing some of the analytics work, some of the data, more heavy stuff there.

And there's a guy who was a contractor there doing the web analytics work. He started his own company doing this, it's actually a pretty cool startup, but it's very data heavy, not surprisingly, because that was kind of his mindset and he was looking for somebody, so he kept talking to me and I swear every time I'm in between jobs.

He reaches out saying Hey man, you interested doing this random, analytical kind of work. And it's because how, who else do you know who's really good at doing web analytics or data analytic, large data model projects? Like honestly, I can't really name that many people. So whenever you have that kind of weird situation the numbers are really small, and if you're hitting this market who isn't very familiar with individuals in this market, you are one of the one and only. Now, if everybody who I talked to knew other people who were, let's say, AI experts, they would never talk to me. But if I can interject myself in an audience who isn't so familiar with it, the broader audience, I'm their one and only.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: So there, there's also like a niche down in some ways, but it also can be, you take your niche and you try to publicize it to those who don't know that niche. And that's always been our, a niche again.

Dave Dougherty: And that's always been our recommendation for ai. Apply it to what you already know.

So it's not, I'm the AI expert, it's, I'm the AI expert for content creation, for massive data sets for sure, new product introductions, what, whatever it is your role is and how you can figure out how to use it. That's where you can apply that.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I think this is a fascinating topic.

Clearly we've done a ton of episodes on it where. Going to do a ton more episodes on it given the, stats that Alex shared whenever we find ourselves in the same position. Yep. Yeah. So please share your thoughts. Let us know what resonates, what are you thinking, what are you experiencing?

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