Svitlana Iotko

The most important thing I attribute my success to is my family who supports me, and also God, because I'm a believer. I believe that God helps me, He supports me, He motivates me, and gives me ideas. Without their support and guidance, I wouldn't be where I am today.

The best career advice I can share is to start working on your personal brand as early as possible. Even if you work for yourself or are self-employed, your personal brand is something you should start developing early - the earlier, the better. When you start your company or business, if you have a good personal brand, your personal brand will help develop your business brand and reputation. I'm helping other people with their brands to be more popular on social media and in real life, and I truly believe that personal brand and online presence are now the most important things for success in the United States. However, it's crucial to keep balance - take care of your online presence, but don't spend too much time there because it can take you away from your real life. Real life is more important than online presence, but you should either learn to manage your personal brand yourself or hire a specialist who can help you, because being present online is very important now.

If you're going into PR or communications, I would recommend starting with journalism as well, because a journalism background helps you a lot in communication, PR, and media production. Definitely take public speaking courses, because it helps you stand out among other people, and if your profession is connected with needing to talk a lot, you should be confident in this. But before you commit, I would recommend meeting more people in this sphere and communicating with them to see if you really like this field first. Not just taking professional courses right away - meet professionals, ask them questions, and get as much information as you can from this sphere to decide if you're really the kind of person who can thrive in it. Some people are more closed, some people are more open, so you need to be confident that you will survive in a profession where you need to talk a lot, meet many people, sometimes get exhausted, and sometimes do production at night without sleep. The more people in the sphere you meet, the more ideas you'll have about whether it's right for you. There are no wrong questions - the more questions you ask, the more answers you have, and then you can make your own decisions and choices. Learn from professionals so you don't make the same mistakes they did. You can follow their advice and be more successful, maybe even achieve things faster. It's very important to learn from other people's experiences, not just from your own mistakes. Talk to professionals and learn from them - they can give you good advice.

I think the biggest challenge in communications and media production right now is AI. On one hand, AI can be a good help - it can do a lot of editing work for you, help you compose different presentations, or even create videos for you. But it's challenging because real people can lose their jobs, and you're also losing this feeling of reality. You stop understanding who is real, what is real, what is true or not true - you know, like fake news, fake people. It's very challenging right now. In general communications and PR, I think the biggest challenge is that people do not have much time. Everyone is busy, everyone has stress. It's very hard to get people's attention fully. Very often people are talking to you while they're online at the same time, thinking about hundreds of things. People are really busy and very stressed. I see this as one of the biggest problems here in the United States, because back in Ukraine before the war started, it was not like this. I think we had more freedom there. People were not so tight or so stressed, because here in the US, all these loans, all these taxes, everything makes you work, run, do things, and it's so hard to get the time and take a break. It's stressful - I think it's a cultural thing, even an American thing. People who travel notice that there's more freedom in other places, people are more relaxed there.

The most important value to me is inner beauty - how people reflect what's inside, how they talk to people, how they act, and how they fulfill their promises. If they promised something, did they really do it? I would say that good words, good actions, and kindness are the most important things for me. Especially now when there's war happening in my country, it's so important to see the support of other people, and you can see who is kind, who is evil, who has compassion, and who does not have compassion. I believe now is the time when we all should be kind and support each other. These qualities are the most important for me now, because the older you become, the more the things that you value are connected with kindness, integrity, and real actions - how people can support others, not just with words. Words are important because I teach speaking, but actions are more important.