Writing about yourself is an activity fraught with danger, especially when attempting to sell yourself in a professional context. I imagine that even Indiana Jones broke into a cold sweat when attempting to reconcile his tomb-robbing, native-thumping high jinks with his respectable university professor day-job.

Every human being I have ever met has been (at-least) three dimensional, yet pretty much every CV I’ve read seems to be that of some kind of safe-for-work cyborg living a pasteurised PG-13 version of human existence. What’s more, this grand delusion is not coming from HR departments or hiring managers, no career’s councillor takes us aside at 16 and tells us to hide all the good bits of ourselves in order to be employable… the buck stops with us, we’ve done this to ourselves.

This can be especially true when we are talking about someone who has had multiple different seemingly disparate careers with wildly different skill-sets. Frankly, we’ve got this all wrong. It’s the nuances of our personalities which set us apart from the crowd, it’s our individuality that is appealing to employers, not how good we are at being boring. Why am I banging on about this I hear you ask? Well, I am one of those people who started off in one work bracket and ended up somewhere quite different, and today I want to discuss how the apparently disparate can really be one in the same.

“If all skills are transferable then everything we have ever done has been relevant to what we do now.”

Ever since I could crawl I have been obsessed with audio equipment. At five years’ old I would spend hours exploring all the wires attached to my dad’s teak and brushed-steel hifi separates. I found that I had an innate understanding of signal flow, it was something which made me feel calm and grounded, I understood it and I knew it. A few years later I had built my own home recording studio… even more ‘ins’ and even more ‘outs’ to wrap my head around and I loved it. Upon leaving school I became a professional musician and sound engineer. Even though I loved playing live music, it was still really the plugging in of wires which made me happy. It was also around this time that I started my marketing career…  designing gig posters and flyers for my fellow musos.

Fast forward a few decades and here I am, a digital marketing specialist who used to play music professionally. It would be so easy for me to feel that this first part of my working life has no connection to the now, and I could be forgiven for down-playing this musical phase of my life on my current CV. The thing is, despite what self-doubt might tell us, all skills ARE transferable. And if all skills are transferable then everything we have ever done has been relevant to what we do now. Welcome to the world of career holism.

How exactly are the disciplines of sound technician and digital marketer even remotely similar?

At a glance it would seem to be a bit of a stretch to say these two things are connected, but please bear with me as all will become clear. Firstly let’s talk about input channels. In the world of the sound tech we have many different input channels to deal with, all of which have different parameters and characteristics which must be understood and treated appropriately. Some of these input channels will be front and centre core components of the other all sound, whilst others will be subtle reinforcement and hardly noticeable, except in their absence. This is exactly the same in sphere of digital marketing. The key shared skill here is not just being able to successfully nurture all these different channels simultaneously, but to be able to correctly identify the lead channels for any given song or campaign and prioritise their development/management accordingly.

This brings us on to the next link in the chain; the mixing board. In the world of the sound tech, all of our carefully developed and nurtured input channels have to be combined and managed by a central mixing console. This console is by definition a very complex beast, and it takes much skill and experience to correctly process and amalgamate the many inputs into something cohesive and harmonious. In digital marketing terms this mixing console is represented by a marketing automation platform, a centralised management station processing all parts of the marketing-mix with hopefully harmonious results. Much like an audio mixing console, a marketing automation platform can be extremely complex, but the results will be greater than the sum of the parts if this managing system is utilised correctly.

Next we come on to the noisy bit… the output section. For the sake of this analogy let’s break this down into three distinct points: amplification, FOH and monitoring. In sound engineering, all output channels must first be appropriately amplified to ensure that the method and magnitude of delivery is suitable for the audience. Effective (and appropriate) amplification is also an integral part of digital marketing delivery, after all there is no point in translating your latest email campaign into forty languages if everyone in your segment lives in central Ipswich. The other two points are pretty self-explanatory; FOH (front of house) is just short hand for ‘delivered to the audience’, and monitoring (or reporting & analytics) is what we leverage in order to improve the quality of our FOH activity.

So what’s the point? 

As I have said before: everything we have ever done is relevant to what we do now, meaning that every twist and turn of your career up to this point has had meaning. So the next time you sit down to update your CV or fill in an application form I want you to really think about those work experiences which don’t seem to fit in with the rest. Chances are they the key to understanding something about yourself, something that reveals more than a predictably boring resume ever could… who you really are.