Alana Glasco

I attribute my success to honestly, a lot of hard work, a lot of time spent learning. I got a good education at my college, I had a lot of support along the way from my parents and friends, and then I attribute my success not only to hard work, but to the connections and the people that I've met along the way who have taken the time to mentor me.

The best career advice I've ever received, from my two current bosses and mentors, is to advocate for yourself and ask for what you want. You will get some people in your network and at your organization that will advocate for you, but you have to be your biggest advocate for yourself first. So, ask for what you want. If you have a course that you're interested in taking, ask for that. If you are working towards a promotion, communicate that. Let the team know about it. Nobody can know what you want until you ask for it, and then make yourself clear with what your goals are, what your long-term plans are.

I would say, it goes along to advocate for yourself, but ask for what you want, and don't feel like you have to shy away. There's a lot of times where I have to be assertive. I feel like, maybe people will take it the wrong way, but I have to remind myself that it's a normal request and that I shouldn't feel embarrassed for asking for what I need and for being assertive, and for pushing back if there's too much on my plate, and things like that.

In terms of opportunities, with my company being a startup with around 150 people, there's a lot of opportunities within marketing, or even within other departments, to get my feet wet or dip my toes in. When I was at a larger company, my roles were a little bit more clearly defined, but now at my company, we're moving fast, and a lot of times it's just jump in and help where you can. We did a website relaunch about a month ago, and I was helping create website pages and QA pages. I've gotten a little bit of experience doing HTML coding for emails, which is something I didn't previously have. So with my current industry, there's just a lot more flexibility if I'm interested in something and want to get involved in it. A lot of times, people are eager for help, and they're happy to fill you in so that you can help with the task. In terms of challenges, I think it's a lot of times just bandwidth and balancing how much you're working and how much you're actually spending time with family and friends. I'm really fortunate and lucky that if I do have any challenges or anything I'm confused about or need guidance on, people are always happy to jump on a call with me. I think a lot of the issue is just balancing that time between work and personal life, and then the fact that I work from home, a lot of times it's a little bit of a gray area with what's my workspace, what's my home space, and when to log off for the day. So, then even when I log off, a lot of times it can be hard to turn my brain off and not think about what I have to do the next morning.

I think the values that are most important to me in a company is a good work-life balance and a good culture. We spend a lot of our time and a lot of our life working, so I want to enjoy the people that I work with, and I want to have relationships with them, personally and professionally. And then, just personally, work-life balance is super important to me, and communication and boundaries. I got married about a year ago, so I like to make sure that even though I'm working hard and spending a lot of time at work, that I'm always making time for my husband and my family and friends, so that balance in life is super important to me.