Pros: flexibility, challenging and stimulating work, opportunity to work with a wide range of internal and external groups
Cons: lack of leadership in management, lack of support for staff in distress, silo culture
Typical day: read emails and prioritise tasks for the day. Priorities usually arrive via inbox that morning, ranging from urgent queries from sales teams regarding various new products, urgent marketing tasks, responding to queries from editors, sorting out contract issues, or responding to overnight emails with attached tasks from manager. Always monitoring
– more... political and legislative developments, and competitor activity, and discussing potential new product opportunities with team. Attending conferences, establishing relationships with various external bodies and potential customers, presenting product briefings to sales teams, writing and presenting business cases for the business are just a few of the things that may occur during the day.
What you learned: how to clearly establish and communicate parameters around projects. How to prioritise. How to manage up. How to collaborate with stakeholders. How to communicate clearly. How to manage stress, mine and my co-workers.
Management: an almost total absence of people management in workplace, with short-term business strategy at the top.
Co-workers: immediate co-workers are exceptional people, highly intelligent, sensitive and effective in their jobs.
Hardest part of job: lack of leadership and interest in people within management. Seriously under-resourced. The need to compete for resources. Short-term business goals and decisions made an executive team that does not understand the nature of the business.
Most enjoyable part of job: opportunity to work with a wide variety of people in and out of the business, meeting market needs, the process of creating new publications from start to finish, and the sheer variety of the job. And working with fabulous co-workers. – less