Digital Transformation’s Impact on Advertising Industry - The rise of the startup hype

Did you ever wonder where and why should you apply for your first job(s)?

#1 — Digital Transformation — The rise of the startup hype

The Digital transformation has made the small companies, more than ever, the best place to start a career.

Everything in life is dynamic as time passes by. New innovations, technologies, ideas, needs, …, come to life and so, one has to evolve, transform. In the midst of the digital era, the need to embrace these new tools, ways of doing business to match customers evolving needs is real. It’s necessary in order to maintain a competitive advantage vs competitors and/or new entrants.

Let’s have a look at the opportunities it can create for young graduate when it comes to start one’s career.

Career or learning path

A few years back, Jack Ma, Alibaba founder, gave his now famous advice when it comes to managing one’s career:

  • Be a good student (under 20);
  • Follow a good boss (small company — 20–30);
  • Work for yourself (30–40);
  • Focus on things you are good at (40–50);
  • Work for or invest in young people (50–60)
  • Spend some time for yourself (over 60)

Why one, between her 20 and 30’s, should go and work for a ‘small company’? Pretty interesting detail, isn’t it? Actually, I can’t agree more with this statement.

First for having built and managed a small company, it makes me not very objective for sure. Now, having had the experience of large companies, working inside and for as supplier, allows me to bring some objectivity to this discussion.

Note that when speaking about SME, small company, I refer to small local autonomous structures.

When graduating most of the students are not properly prepared to searching for a job. It does not come as a surprise that the big names of large corporations pop up in their mind first. It will be mostly companies they are dealing with in their daily life (banks, automakers, FMCG, retailers, …), and often the same present in the job fairs and/or offering internships.

As a consequence, thousand of small companies remain totally under the radar.

You can’t judge a book by its cover

From a young graduate perspective nothing is more reassuring than going for the big ones. It offers a shiny title, a golden package, a nice line on a CV and more important a social reward from the parents and friends. Despite some progress these last 5 years, small companies, at the opposite, keep struggling in competing with the big ones on the recruitment turf.

Interestingly, all the above mentioned elements are related to the external social pressure. The ideal corporate path, a very 60–70–80’s vision of our occidental society. In the meantime, the “disrupting” Silicon Valley has emerged, with the advent of the public internet in the 90’s, bringing what we can call the Digital Transformation. Not per se changing the essence of what we do but much more how we do it and its formal aspect. Might it be building, communicating, working, consuming, interacting, …

Challenging the status quo of the classical dominant layers of the society (established people, established companies), the rise of the technologies has brought the wave of startups’ hype.

When I graduated back in 2005, none of the students I graduated with was interested in tech nor in entrepreneurship. A little bit more than ten years later, it’s hard to find students that would not consider working for Facebook, Google, … , willing to change the world with new technologies. Tech, startups and entrepreneurship are the new cool.

To be continued …

Nicolas Debray

Author

Nicolas Debray

Managing Director

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