This past May I sat on a panel at the American Marketing Association (AMA), Toronto event, inside a beautiful space called The Combine, which happens to be located inside the CBC, a place that holds a lot of meaning for me personally.
The room was full of marketers. Some thriving. Some quietly worried. Many navigating a job market that feels more uncertain than it has in years. AI is reshaping roles overnight, experience no longer feels like the protection it once was, and where the question “what am I actually worth?” has never felt more urgent or more personal.
We weren’t there to talk about resume formatting.
We were there to talk about something harder and more honest than that.
You cannot out-resume someone with more experience than you. So stop trying.
The moment you stop competing on someone else’s terms is the moment you start winning on your own.
But that requires knowing what your own terms actually are. And most people have never stopped long enough to figure that out because the job market keeps telling them to update their LinkedIn headline, add more keywords, get another certification.
None of that is wrong. But none of it is the point either.
The point is your story.
Before I was a brand strategist in B2B tech, I was a broadcast journalist. Before I was a journalist, I was a dance teacher.
Three careers that look nothing alike on the surface.
But at the heart of every single one of them, I have been a storyteller.
In dance, I taught people how to express what words couldn’t say. In journalism, I told the stories of communities that needed to be heard. In tech marketing, I translate complex connectivity solutions into human narratives that make people feel something.
The thread was always there. I just had to learn to see it and then learn to say it out loud without apologizing for the winding road it took to get there.
Your non-linear path is not a liability. It is your differentiator. The question is whether you’ve done the work to understand why.
Stop chasing the unicorn
My fellow panelist Craig Lund made an important point: so many talented people overlook genuinely great companies because they’re fixated on the big name, the conglomerate, the brand that looks impressive on a business card.
But here’s what I’ve seen firsthand: medium and small companies are often where the real development happens. Less bureaucracy. More autonomy. The chance to actually touch the work, own outcomes, and grow faster than you ever would inside a giant machine where you’re one of thousands.
The best opportunity in the room might not have the most recognizable name. Don’t walk past it.
And about rejection, let’s reframe that too. Just because you didn’t get the job doesn’t mean you weren’t good enough. You are. Believe it in your bones and it radiates outwards.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you: a company gets six months to evaluate whether you’re the right fit for them. You should give yourself the same six months to evaluate whether they’re the right fit for you.
The interview goes both ways. Always.
Not getting a role isn’t failure. Sometimes it’s protection. Sometimes it’s redirection. And sometimes it’s simply a misalignment that would have cost you far more to discover after the fact.
The people who came up to me after the panel are who I’ll carry with me.
A woman who came with her young son. Doing her master’s. Running her own podcast on YouTube. Building while studying. That kind of energy is contagious.
A young woman who moved from Saskatchewan to Toronto: new city, new career, new chapter. The courage that takes is underestimated.
New immigrants navigating a country and a job market simultaneously, trying to figure out how their experience translates, wondering if they belong in these rooms.
You do.
My answer to every single one of them was the same:
What is your value proposition? If you look at everything you’ve done, the jobs, the pivots, the unexpected detours, what is the golden thread running through all of it? What is it that makes you distinctly, irreplaceably you?
It won’t be on your resume. But it is the most important thing you will ever learn to articulate.
Figure it out, leverage it, and own it completely in your most authentic self.
Those exchanges reminded me why giving back cannot be a checkbox.
It has to be real and instinctive. It has to come from the part of you that remembers what it felt like to be on the outside of a room you desperately wanted to be inside.
I remember that feeling. I’ve lived that feeling. And I refuse to forget it now that I’m often the one on the panel.
A young man in the room asked me a question that stopped everything.
He said: you talk about putting yourself out there and being authentic but what if you don’t know things? What if you’re not ready?
I asked him: do you believe in yourself?
He said yes.
I said: then that’s the first step. You don’t need all the answers. You need the capacity to try, the resourcefulness to figure it out, and the honesty to stop pretending you know things you don’t.
Because here’s the truth nobody says out loud in these rooms.
Most of us have bluffed our way through something. Most of us have said yes to a project we weren’t fully ready for. Most of us have learned by doing, by failing quietly, by figuring it out in real time.
The people who stand out aren’t the ones with the most polished answers. They’re the ones willing to show up as exactly who they are with experience, gaps, winding path and all and make that the asset.
I took an impromptu poll in the room.
I asked: how many of you have applied for a job you didn’t actually want?
Almost every hand went up, including mine.
And that moment said everything.
When you’re applying for everything out of fear, and you land something you never wanted, of course it doesn’t work out. You never wanted it in the first place.
So be honest with yourself. Where do you actually want to land? What does that look like? What kind of work makes you feel alive rather than just employed?
Build a framework. Work toward it. Be intentional about the direction even when the path isn’t perfectly clear.
This doesn’t mean you won’t take jobs that aren’t your first choice. Sometimes you have to. Sometimes that’s exactly where you need to start in order to get to the next level.
My own path went from CBC to the Richmond Hill Public Library to Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation to Canadian Hearing Services and to Dejero. Not to mention the consulting and freelance work along the way. None of it was linear.
But every single door led me exactly where I was always meant to be.
When a door closes, and it will, look for the one that opens. Then walk through it fully. Don’t stand in the doorway wondering why it’s not a different door. Ask yourself: what am I going to learn here? What is this going to teach me? How is this making me better?
Every role is a chapter. Not the whole book.
Let’s talk about AI. Because we have to.
Yes, AI has displaced people. Yes, the layoffs are real. Yes, the fear is legitimate.
And also, as Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, has said, AI will create new millionaires too. I believe that. But only for the people who crack their internal code. It starts with an idea, your idea, and you leverage AI to amplify it.
Use AI to make you a better marketer. Let it handle what it’s good at so you can focus on what only you can do.
But do not let it swallow your voice.
Because here’s what’s already happening and it’s both fascinating and alarming: people are getting tired of AI content. We are barely at the beginning of this era and audiences are already learning to feel the difference between something generated and something lived. Between content that was produced and a story that was told.
Craig said it plainly: if you sound like everybody else, you won’t stand out.
And right now, AI is making everyone sound like everybody else. A homogenized sea of content where no individual voice rises above the noise.
The antidote is not less technology. It’s more humanity.
Authenticity. Relationship building. Real stories from real experience. The things that cannot be prompted into existence because they have to be lived first.
The algorithm can write a caption. It cannot be you.
The job market is hard right now. AI is real. The uncertainty is real.
But the answer isn’t to become more like everyone else.
It’s to become more specifically, unapologetically, articulately yourself.
Find the thread that runs through everything you’ve done, even the things that seem unrelated. Name it. Own it. Lead with it.
That thread is your brand. And no algorithm can replicate it.
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