Hi guys. I’m looking for some advice about job hunting and I’m sorry if this kind of post is not allowed. It’s a bit boring so sry in advance
I will try and keep it short: I currently work for a self-employed person in Japan. I’m the only employee. My official job title is related to market research and marketing in English. I’m on a Humanities visa which is good for the foreseeable
However, I don’t actually do any of those things. I’m more of an office assistant now. I mainly do simple data entry, filing, photocopying, faxing, general clerical work with little to no brain power involved
I want to change jobs and my resume looks good on paper with 3 years of marketing/market research experience in Japan but… I don’t actually know how to do the things written on my resume!!!
I was thinking abt learning marketing and market research from YouTube or something but I wonder how much that would be worth when people hiring me are expecting 3 years of experience??
I actually have no idea what an actual marketing and market research job involves. My current employer hired me out of English teaching and then the pandemic hit so English marketing etc. was not really a priority.
Should I apply for marketing jobs?? Or is there something else an N3 person can do??
I’m freaking out. Someone will probably hire me and realise I’m totally freaking useless and fire me on the spot
Sry for the long post! I’m 27 btw. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing or any advice? Thank you!
3 comments
Have you asked your current employer for more experinece or a leadership role on some project? If not I wonder why. You might want to try. Beyond that, if someone asked you for your “portfolio” what would you have in there? Did you gain exposure to company projects, even if you were not in the lead? Put your best foot forward and see if you can interview your way into a level-up job if that is what you really feel you need.
Why I can’t directly answer your question, calling your work experience little to no brain power will mean that’s the type of job you will get next. Be a marketing person and put a little shine on your work experience and fake it till you make it or else you will be forever stuck in a no brain power job.
I do market research for living. 1 year experience.
Market research is in short, it is answering a question from your corporate client. The questions are among lines:
What is trending with product type X?
What are the minimum specs/most important traits for a product X in a field X?
What do major companies do on a field X?
And so on. Something that helps the strategy, marketing and product development teams in the client corporation.
Then you plan and carry out research as agreed with your client. Methods are usually either analysing (summarising) open data or interviewing relevant people or a combination of both. Finally, write a report in simple terms so that some important corporate person can digest the info in one minute with simple yes/no answers.
There is a myriad of little things but most of it seems to involve handling the jargon and client relations rather than some difficult methodologies or abstract concepts. Unfortunately, quality research is often dismissed in favour of something “that gets the job done” ie. fills an excel chart somewhere.
I think you can totally fake it till you make it, especially if you Google some basic terms like quantitative, qualitative, market size, share etc. before hand and downplay the experience as assistant data input job a bit (it’s a needed skill because lot of market research involves that kind of brainless stuff anyway)
N3 is a hard one tho…