I worked for a small startup agency with about eight employees as their sole marketing person for a year. I’m also an undergraduate, which made the job overwhelming for me. My responsibilities included ideating for monthly campaigns, developing art direction, creating content calendars, producing weekly content (designs, reels, captions), ideating for articles and worksheets, either managing them by delegating to junior consultants or writing them myself, creating newsletters, tracking metrics, delivering quarterly reports, and occasionally doing strategy research or website management.
It was a lot, especially since I was expected to both create and manage these projects, and I’m not a project manager. There was a senior consultant with marketing experience who managed me to some extent, but she wanted to step back from marketing to focus on consulting, which is her main role. This meant I was supposed to be both the strategist and the executor, a role I struggled with. Eventually, I was placed on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), but I resigned before it took effect.
Everyone around me thinks I’m crazy for leaving a job that’s considered high-paying for someone my age in my country (I worked remotely for an agency based in a first-world country, so what they consider low pay is a high wage here).
Now, I’m starting to have second thoughts because I don’t know if I’ll find another job that pays as well. However, the pressure of being the sole person responsible for all aspects of marketing was too much. They also expected me to handle SEO and manage their podcast, tasks I couldn’t keep up with.
The agency is replacing me with a part-time freelance marketing manager, who will have the same duties I had plus a few more, like PR and event management. I genuinely don’t understand how they expect a part-timer to manage all of that.