In this monthly column with NGEN, the MFA’s training program for media professionals with less than five years’ experience, Initiative’s Somerled Young calls on his peers to stop pretending they know everything already and start seeing inexperience as an opportunity rather than a source of embarrassment.
After four years of study and part time work in media, I joined Initiative as an Investment Associate around a year ago. Perhaps like many newcomers before me, I quickly realised how much I had to learn, and was left feeling like I was way over my head.
Honestly, I was just lucky enough to walk into a workplace culture where I never felt discouraged to speak up and I’m grateful to have developed a mindset that treated my newness to the industry as a grace period for asking questions.
In a fledgling media career, one of the few tools you have at your disposal is your freshness. While everyone else is ‘deep diving’, ‘circling back’ and ‘moving the needle’, feel free to have your ducks completely out of order and bring things onto the front burner instead. Your very newness to the industry arms you with the safety and purpose to have really frank conversations with expert colleagues and publishers—and you don’t have to pretend to know anything!
My biggest tip for anyone starting a media career is to stop seeing questions as selfish or as slowing others down and instead recognise them as something that benefits everyone.
I used to worry that asking would come across as a vulnerability and earn eye rolls, but my seniors have only ever seen it as a sign of investment and a way to ground their ideas in clearer explanations. It’s something I couldn’t recommend more.
I have found that the onus to establish these conversations rests on you. We work in a supportive industry. No one will reject a conversation or coffee with you, but they certainly aren’t going to organise it themselves. I seek out regular meetings with people I respect, including leaders outside my team, and I ask questions as basic as what their to-do list looks like.
I also recommend asking your questions via email – for example, don’t be afraid to message long-term employees for a further explanation where possible, because it’s so much better than you agonising and guessing to figure it out.
So, stop acting like you know everything already. Next time you’re in a meeting, don’t just nod along and act like across every piece of jargon there is – do you really know what a data “cleanroom” is? – and instead recognise that a question can be a much-needed moment of clarity for all involved. Trust me, it’s not something to be embarrassed about.
Otherwise, you risk reaching the end of a long discussion or collaboration and becoming that figurative CEO who asks how to save a file as a PDF. What would you find more embarrassing?
