Last fall marked four years working at APW for me. The funny thing is, when Meg hired me (for a part-time editorial assistant position), I told her that under no circumstances did I ever want this to turn into a full-time job. After three years in the corporate grind, I knew one thing to be true: I just wanted to work for myself. Fast-forward a few years and it is painfully obvious that I am not cut out to be my own boss. Someone else’s boss, sure. I do that with joy. But not The Boss, in the Soprano’s sense of the word. That, I am terrible at.
I don’t think it’s an accident that I decided I wanted to be my own boss at the same time that I decided I wanted to throw a non-traditional wedding. It was the late days of Internet 1.0, when blogging was a thing people did for fun, before social media manager was a job title you could actually have, and when the only answer to following the traditional path was to make a hard turn and go as far in the other direction as you can go. Unhappy with your desk job? Start your own business!
And the truth I’ve learned these past few years is that there are a small, select group of people who are actually cut out to run a business (and surprise, I’m just not one of them). Which leaves the rest of us to figure out how to carve out a meaningful space in the (often male-dominated) workplace with little guidance from the world at large. And that’s no small task.
So this year, as we continue our partnership with Squarespace, we’re opening up the dialog. We’ll continue talking about entrepreneurship, of course (APW is still a woman-owned business, after all), but we’ll also be expanding the conversation to talk about what it means to just… be a woman in the workplace right now. So with that in mind, we figured we’d kick things off by asking you what kinds of career-related discussions you want to be having and who you’d like us to be having them with.
Tell us: what career conversations should we be having on APW this year? What kind of advice do you want? Which discussions should we be having?
This post was sponsored by Squarespace. These days, it’s almost a requirement to have some kind of online space where your work can live, either in the form of a portfolio site, an online resume, or other hub where you can show off how awesome you are. And Squarespace provides the creative tools that make it easy to build it beautiful, even if you’ve never made a website before and have no idea where to start. In conjunction with our career series this year, Squarespace is offering APWers a 10% discount on yearly subscriptions when you use the code APW16 at checkout. Click here to get your website started today with a free 14-day trial from Squarespace.
