Welcome to the industry. Now the real work begins.

Placements are the gateway, not the destination. The next twenty-four months will decide whether this becomes a career or just a job you held for a while. What follows is not theoretical. It is what twenty years across agency and in-house work has taught me – and what I tell every young member who joins my team.

1. Begin your career in an agency.

An agency will teach you what no classroom and no corporate induction ever will. You will handle five sectors in three years. You will pitch, write, present, recover from a missed deadline, and do it all again before the week ends. You will learn how to read a client, how to manage a crisis at 11 PM, and how to stretch a small budget into a credible campaign. The pace is unforgiving, and that is precisely the point. By the time you move in-house, you will arrive with instincts that take corporate-only professionals years to build. Corporate teams quietly prefer to hire people who have already been through that fire.

2. AI is your leverage. It is not your thinking.

AI will help you draft faster, research wider, and stress-test your ideas. What it should never do is replace your judgement. The moment your manager reads your note and hears a chatbot instead of you, you have made yourself replaceable. Your value lies in the point of view, the client read, the instinct for what will land and what will not. Protect that, and sharpen it every week.

3. Trust is built slowly. It breaks instantly.

You will feel pressure to have an answer in every meeting, to file the release before the competition, to sound certain when you are not. Resist that pressure. It is entirely acceptable to say, “Let me come back to you on this.” What is not acceptable is improvising a fact, glossing over a detail, or pitching a client before you understand what they actually sell. Read the annual report. Read their last three press hits. Read their competition’s coverage. Clients can tell within the first five minutes of a conversation whether you have done the homework, and that impression follows you through the rest of the engagement.

4. Read the room before you experiment.

Initiative is rewarded in this industry, but only when it is directed. Before you pitch the bold idea, understand what your management actually cares about this quarter – revenue, a specific client, a specific market, brand health. Pitch into that priority. Earn your first approval. Deliver against it. Then push the boundary. A flashy campaign that misses its mark does not just cost the budget that funded it; it costs you the credibility you need for the next approval, and the one after that.

5. Crises no longer begin in a press release. They begin on X and Instagram.

By the time a journalist calls for comment, the story is already three hours old and trending. Watch your client’s mentions before they ask you to. Track their competition. Notice the comment that is about to become a thread. The communications professional who flags a brewing issue at 9 AM is worth ten of the one who drafts a brilliant response at 9 PM.

6. Protect the intellectual property. All of it — including the faces.

We invest considerable effort in building leadership visibility through bylines, interviews, podcasts, and panel appearances. That work matters. But every public clip is now potential training data for someone, somewhere, who wants to clone a CEO’s voice or place a CFO’s face into a fraudulent video call. This is no longer hypothetical; it is happening to companies you have heard of. Know your organisation’s AI policy. Understand what is safe to publish and what is not. Before you greenlight the next executive video, ask one question: is this an asset, or is this ammunition?

A final thought. Skills will get you hired. Attitude will decide how far you go. I have seen brilliantly talented people stall because they were difficult to work with, and I have seen modestly talented people rise steadily because they were curious, accountable, and easy to trust. Choose to be the second kind.

Nobody in this industry has it fully figured out. The professionals who go furthest are the ones who keep learning and keep adjusting. The industry you are entering today will not be the industry you are leading in 2036. Stay curious. Stay grounded. Stay you.

– Nimisha Iyer,
Director – Marketing Communications,
Frost & Sullivan
(South Asia and Middle East).