From Literally Zero to Marketing Hero – Darren Jansen, business development and content manager for IVANNOVATION, has a lifetime love for tech and languages. At IVANNOVATION, he helps software developers get professional localization for their apps, software, and websites. During his time away from the office, he can be found hiking the Carolina wilderness or reading Chinese literature.
We find our protagonist on his knees in the sun pulling weeds for nearly minimum wage. And he’s 30 years old. Yes, that was me laboring part-time, wondering how I could reinvent myself and provide for my family even though everything seemed hopeless. How did I end up where I was? And how did I get to be where I am now as a marketing professional in the translation industry?
Here’s my story. And if you find yourself at what seems like a end, this is also the story of how you can reinvent yourself and enjoy a new future full of exciting possibilities.
How I Became a Nobody at Thirty? | Literally Zero to Marketing Hero
Right after getting a bachelor’s degree in public relations, I moved to China to teach English. I had a fascination with Asian art, architecture, literature, and language, so starting my career in China was a dream come true. That was in the mid-2000s. China had just joined the WTO, and I guess you can say that, rather than xenophobia, the culture was brimming with xenophilia.
As a “foreigner,” I could walk into a restaurant, and the entire kitchen staff would come out to have a look at me. I’d travel, and groups of tourists would take selfies with me. There was a big push for English teaching in education, so expats were welcomed into schools that were desperate to provide English instruction to their students.
Schools were also desperate to show students’ parents that they had good English programs. Hence, schools all over the nation were willing to pay good money for even unqualified English teachers, as long as they “looked like native English speakers.” Once I was invited with a colleague to an extravagant banquet to be introduced as the host’s “foreign friends.” In the car, my colleague said, “We foreigners are just window dressing.” In other words, we were there to be pictured on brochures and websites and to be introduced at banquets.
I could receive accolades for the simplest of achievements. Meanwhile, my Chinese colleagues, who were talented, knowledgeable, and accomplished, worked countless hours for little recognition. So all that to say, I had an extremely comfortable life. I didn’t have to struggle to survive. And as you know, when you don’t strive, you don’t get stronger. After several years of an extremely easy life in China, I realized that my career had stalled.
What I Learned in China?
Although I wasted time in China, letting my career stagnate in some sense, I can’t say my China experience was a complete waste. I learned valuable skills and lessons which would help me throughout the rest of my life.
Chinese
While I lived in China, I learned Chinese. Having Chinese speaking and reading ability opened up incredible opportunities for me. Learning a language and having no other skills won’t help you much. But if you combine second language fluency with skills in a particular industry, you become a force to be reckoned with.
First, learning a second language can help you get opportunities for jobs for which fluency in that language is a requirement. Second, it can just add something distinctive to your résumé so that people will remember you. This is especially true for less common languages like Vietnamese or Afrikaans, but even having Spanish on your résumé could set you apart, especially in the USA, where so many people are basically monolingual. Third, it breaks the ice. When you talk to people in their native language in many cultures, they trust you more and are willing to open up and talk with you.
For example, once I was at an event in Los Angeles where a founder of a large Chinese logistics corporation was invited to speak. We talked in Chinese and connected on WeChat. I visited him in Brooklyn later, and once, he nearly dropped by my house. He’s a wealthy and powerful individual; it’s simply the fact that I could speak with him in the native language that opened up the opportunity to build a relationship with him.
Value of Study and Self-Improvement
After I began studying Chinese classic literature, one aspect of Confucianism that was influential to me was the importance of study and self-improvement.
The beginning of The Great Learning, one of the Confucian classics, says:
大学之道，在明明德，在亲民，在止于至善。
Translation:
The gists of The Great Learning are to advocate and enhance the untarnished human heart, to arouse the masses to make a fresh start in life, and to inspire people to aim at absolute perfection.
The Three Character Classic, an ancient poem intended to teach children the basics of Chinese culture says:
子不学，非所宜。
幼不学，老何为。
玉不琢，不成器。
人不学，不知义。
Translation:
For children to neglect to study is to act unwisely.
If in youth they do not study, what hope do they have when they are old?
Just as jade left unshaped will not be prized jewelry,
So a man who hasn’t studied, will not show truth or reason.
This Confucian reverence inspired me for study and self-improvement. So I made it a goal always to read and study as much as I can to improve my ability to serve my fellow man.
This line from the Three Character Classic became my motto: “自修齐，至治平。”
It means something like, “If you want to change the world, you must first cultivate your own character.”
The Career Crash
Finally, after years of teaching English and living in China, I knew I needed to make a change in my career, so I moved back to America. For some reason, I expected that the transition would be smooth and that I could use my bachelor’s degree and internships to snag an entry-level public relations or marketing job.
Instead, I discovered that my résumé was ignored because I had disappeared from the USA for almost a decade and had done no public relations or marketing at that time. I vainly and arrogantly searched for work in my chosen career for almost a year. By that time, I had grown dispirited and depressed. That’s when a friend with a landscaping business hired me part-time.
Now, landscaping is wonderful to work. It’s noble work. It can even make you rich. What bothered me was not the work; what bothered me was that I was doing it at the absolute bottom level. I was doing high school dropout level tasks with a bachelor’s degree.
As I was pulling weeds in the sun, my mind was free to consider my plight. I finally realized that the strongest point on my résumé was my teaching experience, and I would have to go back to teaching before I could go on to marketing.
Soon after that, I got a job teaching English as a second language (TESL) at a small language school and began thinking of how I could transition from teaching to marketing.
Doing a Little Extra
When you are stuck in your career, how can you get out of the rut? Should you hope for a stroke of good luck? Well, let’s listen to the wisdom of Frederick Douglass, an escaped drudge turned statesman, from his speech Self-Made Men. He said,
I do not think much of the good luck theory of self-made men. It is worth but little attention and has no practical value. . . . It divorces a man from his own achievements, contemplates him as a being of chance, and leaves him without will, motive, ambition, and aspiration.
So his view of luck is that it is useless for determining success. There is something else that we should look to for a means of success. What is that something else? He says,
When we find a man who has ascended heights beyond ourselves, who has a broader range of vision than we and a sky with more stars in it than we have in ours, we may know that he has worked harder, better, and more wisely than we. He was awake while we slept. He was busy while we were idle and wisely improved his time and talents while we were wasting ours.
From this passage, I realized that I had been wasting my time and talents while others improved on theirs. If I were to change careers someday, I would have to start making my future career now for free or for low wages until I could build up experience on my résumé.
So I reached out to the school’s general manager I taught at and asked if I could do marketing for the school. He agreed to let me do marketing for four hours a week at $10 an hour.
The pay wasn’t much, but the pay was not the point. The point was to get marketing experience on my résumé, to use my teaching job as a slingshot into a marketing job.
I threw myself into the work, putting four hours of marketing on my timesheet and then working even more off the clock. I created and maintained social media accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks. I created video content for YouTube and had designers create multilingual posters to put up at ethnic groceries around town. I worked with videographers to create video advertisements. I wrote blog articles. I managed the WordPress website. I also provided tech consulting for the teachers. Anything I could do that seemed relevant to a career in marketing is what I did so that I could put it on my résumé.
Making Relationships
I made a point to meet professionals anywhere I could. I joined as many networking events and corporate promotional events as possible. At these events, I asked people about their work and shared what I had learned about marketing. I also used relationships I had with friends and people from my church, letting them know what I could do and what I was looking for.
It was through one of these relationships that I ultimately found my marketing job. A headhunter from my church set me up for an interview with IVANNOVATION Language Management, a translation company. I actually thought that the interview went quite poorly until I received a call later asking if I would join the company. What ultimately won for me this position was my unique international experience, my Chinese language ability, and the extra effort that I made to do marketing work on the side to fill out my résumé.
Growing a Career in Marketing
As a marketing professional, I’m concerned with getting eyes on our content, finding leads for the sales pipeline, and analyzing ROI. One of the most important things you can do is to insist on continuing self-education to grow in the marketing career. Visit your library’s website and see if you can get free access to books about your career or educational websites like Lynda.com.
If you arrogantly think that you basically know what you need to know, your career will stagnate. Instead, you must continually study to keep abreast of current trends in your industry and expand your knowledge about your career.
Tips for Finding a Job in the Career of Your Dreams
I have had the experience of searching for a job unsuccessfully, finally finding a job, and hiring people for my company. Through these experiences, I’ve learned several lessons about how to find the career of your dreams.
- Show what you have done. The top criteria I use to find people to work for us are experience or a strong portfolio. Hiring managers don’t really care if you can tell them what you CAN do. They care what you HAVE DONE successfully in the past. I would never hire graphic designers unless I had looked through their portfolios and found their work attractive. I wouldn’t hire writers unless I read through several of their articles. I wouldn’t hire translators unless I saw that they had translated several projects similar to those I wanted to hire them for. So if you want to get a job, build up your portfolio.
- Build references for your work. An important principle of marketing is social proof: you need to show that other people enjoy your product or service. One way to do this is with user reviews. The same goes for finding a job. Seek out people you have worked for or with and ask them if they could make a brief statement about you and your effectiveness. Use those statements on LinkedIn, on your personal website, on your cover letter, or anywhere you can to build the reader’s confidence in your ability.
- Suppose you can’t get someone to pay you for your work, volunteer. Do anything you can do to put on your résumé, build up a portfolio, and collect references. Do you like pets? Offer to do social media management for an animal shelter. Do you have a friend or family member with a small business? Offer to build them a website for their company. Are you part of a church or some other social organization? Help plan and execute events. It’s not hard to find people who could use your free help.
- Reach out to people you know and ask what they need at their business. Business people are often willing to pay for somebody to do something, but they’re too busy to go ahead and look for someone to do it. Or maybe they spend their own time doing something when they should find someone else to do it for them better and faster. So ask people what challenges they face. If they mention something, you can help with, pounce!
- Grow your network. Join networking events, but realize that those surface-level relationships you build at those events probably won’t do too much for you unless you focus on growing deeper relationships outside of the networking events. It’s more likely that a childhood friend or someone at your church will be able to connect you to someone who needs what you offer rather than someone you just met and talked to for 2 minutes at network “speed-dating.” For a research-based understanding of how to use connections to transform your career, read Friend of a Friend by David Burkus.
- Find out how a company recruits people. Ask, “If you were looking for someone to do X, how would you find that person?” Also, ask, “How would you decide which person to choose?” For example, at IVANNOVATION, if we need to hire a translator, we go to an industry-specific job board. If we can’t find someone there, we might look on LinkedIn. If we can’t find someone there, we might see who filled out our careers form on our website. In other words, for a translator, filling out our careers form is less effective than having an amazing profile on the translation job board and LinkedIn. On the other hand, using our “Write for Us” form is the best way to get hired as a writer. All that to say, different companies may have different ways of finding people to fill different positions. Find out the most effective way for the position you want at the company you are targeting.
- Lean into your specializations. I got a job in the translation industry due to my international experience and language proficiency. When we want to hire translators, we always examine their résumés for extensive experience in the relevant topic area. So build your experience in some specialized area to make your résumé unique. Marketing is great, but if you know marketing and pharmaceuticals or marketing and German, that can give you the edge over another applicant who is only a generalist.
A Bright Future
That’s the story of how a college-educated 30-year-old went from pulling weeds to attaining his dream career in marketing. It had something to do with a few things I picked up along the way, such as Chinese and international experience. It had something to do with being inculcated with the Confucian values of study and self-improvement. It had something to do with building relationships. But ultimately, it had to do with deciding to do extra work on the side sometimes for no payment in order to enhance my résumé.
As Frederick Douglass says,
Allowing only ordinary ability and opportunity, we may explain success mainly by one word, and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting, and indefatigable work into which the whole heart is put, and which, in both temporal and spiritual affairs, is the true miracle worker.
Also read BOING WHOOSH ZING BANG!! How I Ended Up Creating Silly Sounds For A Living