From call centre to marketing director. How Adrianna Wardzała built her skills
Adrianna Wardzała became a marketing director at the age of 23. Before that, she sold over the phone, worked on a helpline and created educational content. She talks about her career path on the "Na Etacie" podcast.
Watch the conversation (in Polish).
Full episode of the SUURowo o marketingu podcast.
The call centre taught her to talk to customers
Adrianna started working after her first year of food technology studies. She was only meant to stay for the summer, but in the end she spent seven years with the organisation.
The first stage was a call centre linked to ICAN Institute, the publisher of "Harvard Business Review Polska". To sell the magazine, she had to know its content. She quickly began reading more than the job required - she became interested in management, marketing, innovation and even mergers and acquisitions.
As a result, at around 20 she was talking on the phone with CEOs, directors and business owners. She did not have their experience, but she understood the problems they talked about better and better.
At the call centre she made 100 - 200 calls a day. "I had never heard so many 'no's in a single day," she recalls. She learned to deal with rejection while getting to know the world of the people she called: CEOs, directors and business owners.
Adrianna stresses that she did not have the experience of the people she spoke to. But thanks to reading business content, she was able to understand their problems better.
For a B2B marketer, this is a particularly valuable skill. Knowing the product and marketing tools is not enough if we do not understand the customer's reality.
Business knowledge started working in her favour
At the time, Adrianna was not planning a career in marketing. She only discovered marketing on the job.
It was this kind of knowledge that later allowed her to move into other areas of the organisation. Because it is not about a marketer knowing every aspect of a business better than its owner, but about being able to step into the owner's way of thinking and speak the language of problems, not only of their own product.
How she built credibility in client meetings
The next stage was moving to the head office and having more and more contact with other departments and decision-makers.
Adrianna also started attending meetings with larger clients. At first she was mainly there to listen and take notes. But she soon began to speak up when she had an idea or something valuable to add.
At the same time, she was aware that her age could matter. That is why she worked on preparing for meetings and on the way she took part in them. As she explains, it was very important that her managers gave her room to speak. If a client initially treated her as a very young person, her boss's attitude showed that her opinion was taken seriously in the organisation.
So Adrianna not only had to be prepared, but also had to show that she had something valuable to contribute.
What she learned by watching other teams
From the call centre she moved to the helpline, then to the head office and the knowledge management department, where she worked on, among other things, creating an educational portal.
Working at the head office gave her the chance to meet more people and watch how individual teams worked. In the conversation she stresses that, especially early in her career, working in the office allowed her to learn things that would not be easy to pick up through a screen.
At one point, the knowledge department ended up in the marketing team's room.
Adrianna began watching the team's work and getting involved in more topics. Over time she became someone who knew many areas of the organisation and could help with a range of tasks.
This led her to a coordinator role and then - after a change in the director position - to an offer to take on that role.
She was 23.
The chance of promotion was not the only reason she accepted the offer. After taking the job, she also got support from her manager and access to management development programmes. She completed training for first-time managers, followed by further MBA-level management and strategic leadership programmes.
She was given responsibility, but she was also given the conditions to learn how to carry it.
Behind the young director was a team of experienced people
In a story about rapid promotion, it is easy to focus on one person. Adrianna herself, however, points to the importance of the team.
At one point she was responsible for around 40 people. They were experienced specialists who took the quality of their work very seriously.
The conversation includes a telling detail: the team could keep working on version after version of a single headline. Adrianna talks about people who were ready to "wrestle with the 70th version of one headline".
Her job was not to be the best specialist in every area of marketing. She was there to create a space where experts could do their work well.
As she says about her team: "It wouldn't have worked without them."
Career growth has its price
A story of rapid promotion could look like a very smooth road from a first job to a director's position. But that is not how it is presented in the conversation.
There were crises, mistakes, difficult moments and a great deal of work. When something went wrong, she would come to her boss feeling that a disaster had happened. At first she took his calm as a lack of commitment. Looking back, she understood that it came from experience: where she saw the end of the world, he saw possible solutions.
This experience also had its price. Adrianna says plainly: "I didn't have a work-life balance back then. Work was my life."
It is not worth turning this into a universal career recipe. It is part of this story and an example of how rapid professional growth can mean specific choices and giving up some other activities.
Three lessons from this story to take into your marketing
You can hear more about Adrianna Wardzała's path, working with a team, career changes and her decision to leave in the full episode of the "Na Etacie" podcast (in Polish).
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