What I learned in my first job

Lesson 1: Don’t expect opportunities to come your way, go make some

I was a penniless advertising student on a one year course and living in a room in Hendon with time on my hands.? So I asked one of my lecturers for some work experience contacts. ??I wrote some people some grovelling letters and followed up with phone calls.? It was excrutiating but it had to be done.? Then one Thursday afternoon, I struck lucky.? The MD, freshly back from a long liquid lunch accepted my pitch of “I’ll do absolutely anything for absolutely nothing” and ?I was told to turn up the next day.? I did a day and a half a week for about four months, and they hired me when my course finished.

Lesson 2: Imposter Syndrome is real, but deep down we're all imposters?

I grew up in one of the most deprived places in the South East, Thanet.? I left because people had typos in their tattoos and I felt I could do better. ?

Anyway my first lunch media lunch one week into the job was at L’Escargot with The Guardian.? As moments of imposter syndrome go, this one was up there with the best of them.? But I quickly learned that, with few exceptions (Conde Nast reps specifically) pretty much everyone who took me out to lunch was in a similar boat. Just with very large expense accounts. So I learned to lean into it, enjoyed living a London life I could never afford and which cutlery goes with what very fast.? The moment you realise we’re all in the same boat is the moment you realise you’re not an imposter at all.? Get over yourself.

Lesson 3: Never tell someone you have a skill they can use against you?

In my desperation to be useful, I boasted to my media agency MD that I could touch type.? This resulted in him taking me off some of my interesting media planning work to do his typing when his PA was on holiday.? Sexist and annoying, I sucked it up. It’s better not to dwell on these things, it achieves nothing.? But I never told another living soul about my RSA 80 wpm certification. Oops I just did.

Lesson 4: Stick to your principles and beware of job offers made in pubs?

Two years of enjoyable but seriously hard graft down the line, I started looking around for something else because the pay was truly terrible and I wanted to do TV buying.? Media deals were routinely bashed out in pubs and bars and job hunting was no exception.? I got offered another job whilst in a pub but the agency then went quiet on me.? As is my self defence strategy, I moved on and didn’t sweat it.

Around the same time I was due a paltry pay rise from my now late boss.? But when I got my payslip my pay hadn’t changed.? I checked with colleagues and they’d got theirs.? I went in to see him to query the mistake and was told there was no mistake.? That he’d heard I was leaving. I told him I wasn’t leaving. He told me that because I’d considered leaving he wasn’t prepared to pay me a penny more. Ever. I walked. Worst boss ever.

Lesson 5: Never trust a recruitment consultant/honesty is not always the best policy?

Now without a job and with a mortgage to pay, I had to sort something quite quickly.? [On the mortgage thing, the MD paid me next to nothing but was prepared to tell the Building Society he paid me very well indeed to help me get me on the property ladder, for which I remain grateful.]

Naively not knowing how to explain how I ended up without a job, I decided honesty was the best policy.? So I told a recruitment consultant why I left but asked that it wasn't shared with any prospective employer. Anyway, there I was being interviewed and I get asked “So I heard a very strange story about why you left your last job, is it true?” ?Doh.

Later the same day, the person who interviewed me contacted one of the other directors at the place I’d left telling me I was going round town telling lies.? Furious, the director went over to see my then boyfriend/ future husband and told him to sort me out.? Future husband explained that what I was saying was, in fact, true.? Director asked future husband how much he was being paid.? And when he found out he was so shocked at how little it was that he doubled his salary overnight (effectively game him mine).? I meanwhile was still without a job but developing a bad reputation.

Anyway, whilst there was a moment when he was truly the worst boss I’ve ever had, I will never stop being grateful to the man we said goodbye to this week.? He gave me, a girl who left school at sixteen with nothing but a work ethic and the final line of Thunder Road ringing round her head "It's a town full of losers, I'm pulling out of here to win", the single biggest break of her life.? And the lessons I learned – the good ones and the harsh ones – are what have helped shaped the person I am today.? Thank you Tel.