Bright-eyes and bushy-tails: the key to taking over the world
Youths often get a lot of criticism. We are the rebellious, “I’m only going to be this age once!” population that is old enough to do whatever they want, and young enough to not even care.
Sure, being 20-something has its perks – the freedom, the young love, the fun – but it’s not the ‘be all and end all’. Being in your 20s means many things: you are either a varsity student, just graduated, looking for a job or burning out in the workplace in one of your first jobs.
Starting out in the working world, the ‘big, bad, real world’ as my teachers used to call it in high school, is a challenging experience. Every transition in life brings its own challenges: in school, the big move from primary school to high school brought more work and more pressure (all while dealing with pubescent mood swings and the desire to ‘be cool’); then, the transition from high school into the real world. Using my own personal story, I jumped straight into university from high school – others may have opted for the gap year or straight into the working world, all have their challenges. One of the many things that I observed from university is that high school kids were spoon-fed: university work was hard, and there were no teachers there to pester me to do my assignments, study for my tests and attend classes. In university, I was all on my own. Still, I managed to complete my degree with no repeat years.
I completed my university degree in 2012, and got my first job in 2013 – it took me months of applying to countless jobs before I found a company that accepted my application. I was just a Personal Assistant at an advertising agency, but it was something. Joining the ‘working class heroes’ (as I like to call us working folk) was a huge wakeup call for me, and I’m still trying to adjust to it. Throughout life, we are given absolute freedom right up until joining the working force where we jump into the 9-5 life with only one hour off each day and only 14 days holiday leave (15, if we’re lucky). Gone are the three month glorious holidays from school and university. This is the real world, and boy, is it hard to adjust to.
It’s not easy being a 20-something, fresh-faced, naïve and uncertain about how to function in the real world. Most of us still want to party into the early hours of the morning every weekend and couldn’t care less about the consequences even though, being a working class hero, we need to protect our professional reputation and behave with decorum. It makes sense why the only people that like us are our fellow 20-somethings: we are carefree and reckless, obviously not ready to be professional.
This being said, there is so much potential in the 20-something generation. We are ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed’ – full of fantastic, new and innovative ideas that can turn a business into something remarkable. However, most of the time, we tend to withhold from sharing these ideas because maybe we don’t think we know enough about something, or maybe we are just afraid of our ideas being rejected.
This is why Jumpstart has been created: to offer the youth of South Africa an open platform for them to voice their opinions, share their ideas and, above all, learn and grow into a successful communication professional. My hopes for Jumpstart is to encourage the 20-somethings of the public relations and communication industry to build their confidence to take that step forward in their career to achieve greatness.
I have been working within the Industry for almost two years now and have observed that, although the older, more qualified public relations professionals are applauded for their knowledge and expertise, there isn’t much room for the youth.
Jumpstart is nestled under its parent organisation the Public Relations Institute of Southern Africa (PRISA), and is dedicated to only the young members of the industry. There is a gap between 20-somethings and 30+ year old PRISA members. While 30+ year old members discuss topics such as digitisation as a new development in the industry, 20-somethings have grown up in a particularly digital environment, so this is not news to us. Launching on Thursday, 15 October 2015, Jumpstart will provide its members with the appropriate learnings to help them succeed in their career.
It is time to give the youth of the Industry a voice, and an opportunity to learn and grow together.