Tanya Cummings

Just be confident. Do your research and understand the type of business that you're getting into. Marketing is a very broad term, so get yourself really well educated about different opportunities and understand the businesses. Take a look at how companies communicate from top down, because that's really setting the expectation for the group - who the leaders are and how they're presenting themselves, and the general culture of companies. Explore and understand the sentiment of companies before you make a decision. Networking is key, so take advantage of any types of business networking events, anything that you have an opportunity to explore whether it's at your college level or otherwise. I think young people should take the chance to reach out to executives and people within roles that they're looking to hopefully be in one day. They can reach out on LinkedIn. If there's information, they can certainly take the chance and make the connection, introduce themselves, and you just never know where that could take you.

AI is certainly one of the biggest challenges and opportunities. It's an aid and an opportunity to dig deeper quicker when it comes to data and information, because we have information overload. There are definitely tools, like different AI platforms, that help quickly get the information that we need in order to make better informed decisions. At the same time, there's this term being used widely as AI slop from a creative standpoint. Being in a creative field, whether it's communications or content development or thought leadership, there's just so much information out there and content that gets developed through AI that people just don't know what to trust. I think avoiding that AI slop and still creating that human development of content and creative, and making sure that the work that my team is developing is resonating with our customers and it's not being polluted by content that might be overshadowing the reality. As we're looking to build a new website experience, we're really approaching it from not just a traditional sense of how do we build out a good user experience, but we're also thinking about how do we future-proof the experience that we're creating for our customers. Instead of just search engine optimization, we're looking at AEO - how do AI engines search for information? How do we create that input so when somebody is looking for information quickly, tools like Gemini and others are pulling in the appropriate information and bringing it to a customer's fingertips. So it's creating that source of truth that's already built into the experience that we're building out - a modern tech stack, thinking about how people are currently engaging with content and the type of content that they're being served.

I think integrity is number one - just be ethical in the way that you treat people. In general, treat others the way you want to be treated, with respect, at any level. It doesn't matter whether you're talking to the CEO or you're talking to an intern. Going back to that personal branding piece, I think it's really critical because you're your own brand, and the way that you present yourself in your day-to-day life as well as in your professional life. One thing I'm really proud of is that I'm very open about who I am, and there's not a major shift of who I am personally versus how I am professionally. It goes back to that piece of integrity and also just strong relationship building opportunities.