What I Learned in My First Year on the Job

The Beginning

I graduated in June. Spent most of July applying to jobs, going to interviews, trying to figure out what I even wanted. But how do you know what you want, if you can’t compare it with a previous job? By August I had my first job, here at We Do Dev Work as a Junior Marketing Officer.

I remember the first day way too clearly. I walked in nervous, a little excited, mostly just not knowing what to do with my hands, basically. Do I say hi to everyone? Do I wait for someone to tell me what to do? I was so fresh out of school that I didn't even know what I didn't know yet. Looking back now, I had no idea that year was going to teach me this much.

Thairanked: Where I Actually Learned to Write

The first real project I got put on was Thairanked, writing blogs, working on rankings. I got corrected a lot in the beginning, honestly. But that's how I got better. Every piece I wrote, there was always something to fix, something to learn.

This was also where I first started using AI as part of my writing process, mainly for SEO, figuring out how to write with the goal that an article would actually rank on a top position on Google instead of just existing somewhere on page 5 where nobody would ever find it. The first time I saw something I wrote actually show up near the top of a search, I felt genuinely proud. Small win, but it mattered to me.

The tricky part was staying current. I had to know what was happening in the world basically all the time, because if I wrote about something that was already old news, there was no point posting it. My CEO sat down and taught me how to read Google Analytics myself,  which topics were worth pushing further, which ones we should just let go of. That lesson stuck with me more than almost anything else that year: being a content writer isn't really about writing well. It's about paying attention, staying alert and observing the world around you.

When I Was Too Focused on One Thing

At the same time, I was also making tip-style posts for WDDW's social media. If I'm being honest with myself, I was so locked in on Thairanked that WDDW's backlog didn't get the attention it needed from me. I wasn't ignoring it on purpose, I was just... elsewhere, mentally.

That's actually where things started to shift.

The Rebrand

We decided WDDW needed a rebrand. Instagram needed to feel fun and easy to relate to. LinkedIn needed to feel like we actually knew what we were doing. Two platforms, two totally different jobs, and suddenly my role got a lot more interesting than "post the tips."

This rebrand was a big deal for WDDW, and it's how I ended up making short videos for Instagram for the first time.

The first clip I made did way better than I expected. So I made another one. And another one. Slowly people started to recognize us. And then, at one point, someone we were interviewing said they'd seen our videos and assumed we must be a really fun, friendly company to work at.

A stranger, someone who'd never even met us, understood exactly what we were trying to say without us having to explain it. That's when the rebrand stopped being just a task and started feeling like it actually meant something. And every time I see Bam, I know how much my work matters.

None of the clips came easy though. We'd redo takes over and over until something felt right. But the team never really complained, they just kept showing up for it, and honestly that's the only reason the videos turned out as good as they did. I got lucky with the people around me.

LinkedIn Was a Different Beast

LinkedIn needed a totally different voice, professional, knowledgeable, careful. Vincent and Kitar helped me a lot here, reviewing my drafts before anything went out, because the standard for "professional enough" was honestly higher than I expected going in.

It was hard at first. I'd write something, get notes, rewrite, get more notes. But it got easier. Not because I stopped needing feedback, but because I finally started understanding what that LinkedIn voice actually sounded like, instead of just guessing.

The Thing I'll Remember Most

If I had to pick one lesson from this whole year, it's this: there's always a way through a problem, and having good people around you makes almost everything easier.

I started the year not knowing what I was doing. I'm ending it having learned SEO writing, data analysis, shooting and editing video, and how to write for two platforms that couldn't be more different from each other. Not a bad first year, honestly.

A Note to Myself

There's still so much I haven't learned yet. New tools, new platforms, things that probably don't even exist right now. This industry doesn't sit still, so whatever worked this year might not work next year, and I need to be okay with that.

So, don't stop learning. Try the things that scare you a little. Say yes more often than feels comfortable. Whatever comes next, I want to walk into it the same way I walked into my first day: a little nervous, a little unsure, but curious enough to keep going anyway. That curiosity is probably the whole reason I got this far in the first place.