Stepping outside

It blows my mind that shortly after I left university, someone handed me one of the UK’s biggest and most loved brands.

I got a call from my boss a few weeks before I started: “We’ve been really excited for you to start, you’re going to take on Fairy Non-Bio”. I think she was expecting me to be thrilled, but honestly, I’d never heard of it. I thought it sounded cool enough though, and I hadn’t exactly researched my new career much… I had no idea what marketing was, that P&G were quite big, or that I had been given a pretty cool opportunity.

Some of the lessons I learned as a recent graduate—based in Weybridge, I might add—may not be super useful for the wider population. But I find a lot of my mentees nevertheless ask what it was like to be a graduate at P&G, so here are my top takeaways:

1. Your friends are everything. P&G felt like an extension of university—although I was probably less stressed than I was in my final year at Oxford. And someone was paying me for it. Unreal.

My cohort was a group of like-minded, fast-thinking high achievers—and I loved them. I discovered that what came naturally to me, making friends with the people I enjoyed spending time with, came with a significant career benefit too. I found that people in higher ‘year groups’ acted as mentors, teachers, and captains—and that these all round incredible people were willing to put time into helping me learn marketing and navigate the organisation.

One particular superwoman springs to mind—she would walk me through share reports, help me manage difficult conversations, and also coached me through breaking up with my university boyfriend. It baffled me that someone so amazing was willing to give up so much of their time.

2. Competition is real. Naive doesn’t begin to describe 21-year-old me. I really thought as long as I got my head down and did my job, then things would just work out. Wrong.

Whilst my friends were fierce, the competition was fiercer—a manager pot luck (which exists everywhere, of course) meant that chance could affect your rating for the year, or even your next role. In a corporate world you are always being compared, and the internal sales process is as important as the sales you make for your brand—I learned this about a year too late.

Every morning, I used to get to my desk at about 7AM—it was great, I had the place to myself and I got a tonne done. I also lived miles away so heading in super early meant I avoided the worst traffic, too. I normally left at 4PM. My colleague (in the same demographic) got in at 9:30AM, ad left just after 6PM. I was, for all intents and purposes, working more hours—but I was the one called out for being a ‘part-timer’. I had no idea that face time was going to have such an impact, and that my colleague would have an advantage because she worked more traditional hours and ‘stayed late’.

3. Your agency probably hates you. I loved going to agencies. I worked with some of the biggest and best agencies in the world whilst at P&G, and I delighted in the ideas, imagery, and glamorous offices.

But 8 months into my role, I was sent an article about client feedback—and I suddenly realised that maybe I only thought everything was great with my agencies because I was the client. The audacity I had, as a 21-year-old, to make some of the comments I made to my agencies—to some people who had been doing the job for 20 years… they must have hated me.

One thing that I think P&G do incredibly well, is that the most junior person in the room gives feedback first, then the next most junior, until you get to the most senior—so you aren’t unduly influenced by what your boss has said. It helps build a fresh perspective and creativity. Personally, it’s something I have take with me and try to mirror now within my own team—so everyone feels like they have their points heard.

4. Buying your train journey in two parts means you can use your railcard on the journey home and save £1.25 a day.

5. It’s never going to get better than the bottom. All too often now, I hear my Marketing Director friends tell me how much they miss doing marketing. It sounds nuts, but I will never be closer to my brand than I was as a graduate at P&G. I knew Fairy Non-Bio like no one else in the world—I could tell you everything from the ingredients in a Liquitab, to the latest share in Asda. I used to think it would be great at the top and wanted to skip my way there—but I think if you really love a job, there’s a lot to be said for learning from the bottom, up.

6. The pub is where stuff actually happens. I don’t think there are two words are more antithetical than ‘networking event’.

No one ever actually networks at specifically designed events—the senior management will clump together and chat about life, and the youngsters work out where the free bar is before they move on. The real networking all happens at the pub—at P&G, this was the Hand and Spear (the pub next to the station in Weybridge). The pub forged brand alliances, generated ideas, and even catalysed relationships.

In my opinion, this wasn’t about a drinking culture—it was simply about getting to know people, and getting to know how you could help each other. This has been the same in all of my jobs since—although do remember, the higher up you get, the less OK it is to be on the train back to Clapham Junction chanting “in the rack” to your colleagues.

7. Training is king. The only words you should be saying when someone offers you free training is “thank you”. At P&G, the courses, the copy lunches, and the week-long trips to haunted hotels in Geneva were all part of an incredible package that prepared me for life. The reason people love working with ex-Proctoids is because we all speak a common language that we’ve learned from this experience. It wasn’t until I left that I learned that this isn’t true everywhere.