Last week, I participated in a Career Fair at my younger daughter’s high school. I’d never been particularly good at the whole parent-teacher thing, but I was tired of reading career guides that listed web work solely under the ‘IT, Web and Telecoms’ section*.  Occasionally, you might find e-marketing or SEO in the marketing chapter, but where were the references to web content management, development, and maintenance? Nowhere that I could find.

So I signed up, much to my daughter’s dismay (she was concerned her classmates would find me boring).  I wasn’t planning on giving any heavy-duty presentation on content strategy as a field in itself; I just wanted to tell kids who liked words and stories that there were indeed a range of career possibilities they probably had no clue about.

The cafeteria: a good place for an identity crisis

Part of my issue was that I wasn’t sure under which banner I should place myself.  Marketing, communications and advertising?  IT and new technologies?  I wanted to be near both, since I wanted to tell students that people with hybrid skill sets (marketers who understood IT, engineers with a knack for content) were bound to have advantages.

The physical layout of the tables in the cafeteria did not make that very easy, so I took a seat with the marketing parents.  One had a classic marcom background, another came from strategic marketing, while the third managed sales channels.  Then there was me, who focused on web and content.

Our first students arrived (they had to choose which table to visit).  “We’re interested in advertising,” they said.  “Yes, we’d like to create ads like the ones we see on television”. “Or like this one,” said her friend, pointing to one of the several print ads the marcom parent had brought along. “It looks really good.”  This begat a long conversation on logos, and brand image, and media channels (events, magazines, television, and oh yes, web…), and what was marketing anyways…?

Choices, choices: should we study journalism?

Hmm….I wasn’t getting much of a word in, so I thought I’d just approach a few of the students mulling about and ask them what they were interested in.  “We want to be journalists, but our teachers are telling us not to study journalism, because there are no jobs in journalism anymore,” they told me.

Aha.  I’d found my audience.  “Ah, there may not be a lot of classic journalism jobs anymore, but companies everywhere in the world have a need for people with those same skill sets.  I too wanted to be a journalist at your age, I took some courses, was news editor of my university newspaper, but then worked as a copywriter before moving into web content work.  Come, I’ll tell you more about it, I have some screen shots to show you.”

Companies have become publishers, so there are opportunities

Most looked at me with dubious hesitation.  Some came over and a few seemed interested as I told them how companies everywhere had become publishers.  They had websites that were almost like newsrooms, with editorial calendars, story development, interviews, video – the works.  Plus, they had Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that people had to manage.   I also showed them sites of agencies that specialized in generating and organizing content for these sites.  I bleeped over my CMS section, but mentioned that there were a lot of tools that went into generating large websites (I showed them IBM, with its 3 million pages, I thought they’d be impressed).  Still, I could sense I did not have their wholehearted attention.  They kept glancing at the ‘man in the journalism table’, hoping he’d free up soon so they could talk to him.

We all want recognition

So I tried collaring a few other students.  “What are you interested in?” “Oh we want to be journalists,” they chimed in unison.  Wait a minute….”You ALL want to be journalists?” I asked. “Yeah, sports journalists – just like Mr. Sports Journalist.  We watch him on television, and he’s our hero!”

Oh.  And all of a sudden, in the midst of all these adolescents, I felt like I was in 8^th grade again, feeling frustrated that all the boys were lining up to kiss my friend Teresa during a party in my basement –after all, she was super pretty AND she tongued–while I sat on the sidelines. Ah, the appeal of minor celebrity…

Thankfully there were no rock stars present that day.  So I just sat next to Mr. Sports Journalist, and he kindly provided me with a few opportunities to put in a few good words.  His message was much the same as mine: yes, journalism remains a worthwhile pursuit, and yes, there are opportunities — just not necessarily where your average 15 and 16 year old would expect to find them.

*I live in France, so this may not be the case elsewhere in the world.  I’d love to hear what is the case elsewhere.