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Work Life

The First 100 Days In An Advertising Agency

Ad Tribe Editorial2 min read
A small figure at the foot of an oversized staircase, the lowest steps drawn in pencil outline and the rest solid

The job description described the role. It did not describe the first 100 days, which are spent learning a set of things nobody writes down because everyone already knows them.

The formal induction covers systems, timesheets and where the files live. The actual induction is longer and unwritten: who has to be in the room for a decision to hold, which feedback is a suggestion and which is an instruction, and how long a thing can sit before someone comes looking for it.

What the first 100 days really teach

Three things, mostly. How work moves through this particular building, which is never the process on the deck. Whose approval is real, as opposed to whose title suggests it should be. And the difference between a brief that is genuinely open and one where the answer already exists in someone's head.

None of this is taught, and all of it is testable. It is why two people with identical portfolios can arrive on the same day and be having visibly different careers by month four.

The learning is on the job, and that is the risk

Deloitte's India survey found that 94 per cent of Gen Z respondents value hands-on learning on the job, and in an agency that is more or less the only kind available. There is no other mechanism. You learn by being in the room, or you do not learn.

Which means the quality of a first hundred days depends almost entirely on whether anyone senior has the time to let you watch them work. In a busy agency that time is the first thing to disappear, and its absence does not show up on any dashboard.

Nobody fails their first hundred days on talent. They fail them by never being in the room where the decision happened.

What to actually do with them

Ask about work that is already finished rather than work in progress. Nobody has time to explain a live job, and everybody has time to explain one that went well or badly six months ago. That is where the reasoning lives.

Write down the things that surprised you, because the surprise fades fast, and by month six you will have absorbed the same assumptions that made the place hard to read on day one. Those notes are the most useful thing a junior can hand a newer junior, and almost nobody keeps them.

More on the research in Deloitte's India Gen Z survey, and more on Ad Tribe Work Life.

#Creative Careers#Entry-Level Jobs#Work Life
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