I had two 'proper' jobs before I struck out on my own. In total my tenure was just over three years, which was long enough to learn what should be a pretty self-evident truth: -
Your Employer is Not Your Friend
In the mid-80's Unilever, my first employer, had an aggressively promoted Graduate Marketing Programme that roamed Australian campus Careers Days looking for soon-to-be marketing graduates like me. I applied for the programme and was accepted. As a 23-year-old Bachelor of Business with a major in Marketing and Advertising working for the multinational that produced roughly half of the brands sold in any supermarket meant that my career was off to a flying start.
I had chosen marketing for two reasons; I had just enough self-knowledge to know that I didn't have either the maths or the patience for accounting, but mainly the vague idea that a marketing was the job where the advertising agency took you out for The Great Long Lunch.
My immediate problem was that the Graduate Marketing Programme took another 25 marketing graduates on the very same day as me, despite there being only five actual marketing roles on offer. I got shoved into ‘Trade Marketing’ which is a sort of bastard son of sales and marketing that is all number crunching and report printing. There were no long lunches only a boss with a bad haircut and an unenviable yet comprehensive collection of polyester officewear. At least the word ‘marketing’ appeared in my job title – others were randomly dumped in sales, manufacturing, new product development and, in one especially unfortunate case, Occupational Health & Safety.
We learned that the programme was one big lie when we understood the myth of us being on a Six-Month Rotation. Even then I could see it takes at least a year before a graduate accomplishes anything even vaguely useful and no manager is stupid enough to take on two new smug little incompetents every year whose only genuine thought is “When do I get to go to Rockpool?” Closely aligned to The Six-Month Rotation Myth was The Great Overseas Posting Lie which worked like this; about three-quarters of the way through a successful graduate interview there’s a lull in conversation when the HR person leans conspiratorially towards the interviewee to ask in a hushed yet serious voice “How would you feel if we had to send you to say, London, for six months for work?”
The interviewee faces the stern challenge of suppressing an immense shit-eating grin whilst selflessly promising to be available for any and all overseas postings ‘for the good of the company’. Internally The Great Long Lunch is upwardly revised from ‘Rockpool’ to ‘The River Café’. The trick works in company’s favour every time because anyone who dreams of The Great Long Lunch (i.e. anyone in marketing) is a sucker for the prospect of overseas travel. The beauty of the lie is that as long as the employee believes in it then it forms a part of the remuneration package. For over eighteen months I truly believed I was but a heartbeat away from a Business Class ticket to Heathrow and that alone compensated for me being substantially less than my classmates who got sane jobs. I shudder to think what a 24-year-old version of me would have done in the London office had they ever made good their threat, probably just stood around grinning inanely and crashing the mainframe if his cheerfully monolingual Japanese replacement was anything to go by.
To keep us happily underpaid all the company had to do was send a respected if replaceable employee on an overseas secondment every year or so. When the ‘All Staff’ memo hit the notice board (this is all pre-eMail) the rest of us were torn between bilious envy and the internal whispering “I could be next!”
The theory behind the ‘Graduate Marketing Programme’ was that there were plenty more where we came from and this was annually proven to be correct. The attrition rate was either horribly high or spot on depending on how you viewed it. Most of us lasted less than five years in the company and I was gone in under two without ever leaving Trade Marketing.
A couple of my intake did stick it out and both went onto greatish things. If I was asked for adjectives to describe them I would settle on ‘patient’ and ‘unimaginative’; the exact words the business press use to describe the company overall.
The day I realised that I never likely to be on the short list for the long flight to London I felt underpaid. A big part of our salary packages is hope and when that goes we generally follow it out the door.
