Career X Culture featuring Nicole Getsy, Director Strategy, iProspect, US

Welcome to Career X Culture, a series showcasing the talented people of iProspect and their unique backgrounds, passions, and accomplishments. 

In this edition, meet Nicole Getsy, a Director of Strategy at iProspect US as she reflects on the evolution of her career. Read more about Nicole and her role in the Q&A interview below:

Q> What is one skill they do not teach you in school that you use every day?

Nicole> I would say Excel skills. This applies to every discipline within the company. I started off in search, and now work in strategy. My golden rule is if it feels like it is taking too long, there is probably an Excel shortcut. I would encourage everyone to take an Excel training. I wish they taught it in school... maybe they do now!

Q> What was your first job? And what was the most important skill or lesson you learned?

Nicole> My very first job was a marketing internship at a clothing company near Penn State where I went to school. The store sold tons of Penn State clothes and wanted to sell more paraphernalia during football games. There were so many fans who would drive their RVs to the school on Fridays for the games on Saturday, so we had a minivan that would drive to the RV parking lot and ask people Penn State trivia questions, and then drop the participants off downtown in front of our store. What I learned was that your expectation of a job and the reality of the job is not always the same. What I didn't realize was that the people who drove these RVs across the country were the same people every week – and they didn’t like getting repeat questions. This made the job a lot harder than I thought, because I ended up having to do so much research of obscure Penn State trivia. It taught me about my interest in research and is sort of how I ended up in strategy today. 

Q> Is there an early working experience or somebody you met that shaped or exposed you to your current career path?

Nicole> I have two answers for this question. My first is that I was very fortunate that in college, my school participated in a Google Marketing challenge. Google gave teams of four $250 dollars to run a local search campaign for a business in the neighborhood - which is probably hilarious to everyone that works in the industry because that is such a low amount.  During this process we learned all about paid search, marketing, and how to write keywords and the approval process, so that really exposed me to the industry. 

Additionally, when I was an assistant, I was trying to move from the search team into planning.  The Group Director of the planning team let me shadow his team as long as it did not impede with my current role. He was influential in me being able to move into planning because I would not have learned all that I did if he had not given me that opportunity. When I asked to move into planning, he advocated for me to join his team. I thank him a lot for helping me transition over.

Q> For me, iProspect is the Intersection of _______ and _______?

Nicole> I would say it's the intersection of new beginnings and trusted performance.