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Mentorship January 14, 2019
ENTITY Academy taught me hard skills that are indispensable in today's hyper-competitive job market.
As expected, the past seven weeks at ENTITY Academy were extremely difficult. But although the program was challenging, I had a lot of fun learning from ENTITY’s Speaker Series, developing soft skills and most importantly, attaining hard skills. Here’s how ENTITY Academy prepared me for a competitive job market:
Before ENTITY Academy, I was solely an academic writer. I mean that as in, the only times I wrote were to fulfill assignments and essay requirements for classes. Although I’m a fairly strong writer, I have a stiff cynical tone in my writing. The only other form of writing I’m familiar with is (unfortunately) writing lab reports. As you can see, I’ve only done formal writing.
ENTITY Academy helped me become a more versatile writer. Although I struggled heavily compared to the rest of my peers, my writing experience expanded to include fun pop-culture writing, service journalism and short reports. I’ve become a more organized, sophisticated and fast writer than when in school. I typically write around 5,000 words a day now, which is a lot more compared to a 7,500 word term paper that takes 11 days to write.
However, the program made me realize that I still have so much more room for improvement. Even now, my writing is bulky and wordy. I want my command of language, in both speech and writing, to become more articulate, eloquent and concise. And to do that, I need to read and write more and further expand my vocabulary.
The heart and soul of the program, SEO (search engine optimization) training was the main reason I applied for ENTITY Academy. Because search engines play critical roles in what consumers see and click on, all organizations and businesses aim for strong SEO. So, SEO skills are fluid knowledge applicable to almost all jobs in any industry; all organizations and businesses want a bigger clientele.
At ENTITY Academy, I not only learned what SEO is and what good SEO looks like but also how to build good SEO and how to take advantage of it. I also learned how to use analytics and monitoring tools to create a tighter SEO infrastructure. I’m excited to test my abilities in future work and see webpage ranks rise in the search results.
At ENTITY Academy, content marketing was the skill mentees practiced most. It was also the hardest skill to master; good content marketing depends on so many different factors and requires so much experimentation that we’d spend more time brainstorming than actually producing content.
During my seven weeks here, I learned that content marketing is a creator’s bread and butter. It’s one of the only ways to be creative within a controlled corporate environment. Creating content that is well-received or grows an audience while staying within a brand’s focus is challenging. But no matter how narrow a topic might seem, I discovered that there’s always a new perspective or niche to write about. I think that’s the most valuable skill I learned while at ENTITY Academy – that there’s always an opposite side or a new way to spin topics or data.
Previous to this internship, I was already well-acquainted with Adobe Audition, After Effects and Media Encoder from working freelance and with volunteer organizations. I was excited when we learned how to use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign for graphic design and personal branding!
Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects are the industry standard programs for graphic design and video editing. However, I found that Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign are useful to a much wider audience than design professionals. Business-people and young professionals that want appealing personal documents such as business cards, contracts and resumes will find Adobe Creative Cloud mastery a valuable asset.
Although the learning curve is steep, the tools from program to program are similar. Once you’ve mastered one program, learning the others will be a cinch!
Social media management is really hard for the same reasons Economics is really hard. When we were learning about good social media management, everything sounded like common sense. But when asked for audience development plans and how to increase engagement, all of us mentees either didn’t know how to build a strategy or our propositions weren’t good enough. Building a good social media following organically is a much more intricate process than posting well-taken pictures.
At ENTITY Academy, we mentees learned general strategies for social media marketing, how to read and use analytics, the “do’s” and “don’ts” of social media and it’s interconnection with SEO, content marketing and graphic design. It’s really exciting and rewarding to see all these skills come together to create results!
ENTITY Academy is an invaluable working environment for creators of all kinds. Whether you’re a techie, a writer, a graphic designer or an entrepreneur, ENTITY Academy creates a safe space where you can experiment with new ideas, learn new skills and further develop skills you already had. I’m really happy I was a part of ENTITY Academy – this summer spent at ENTITY Academy is one of the best summers I’ve had, hands down.
