Work on it Wednesday: Elevator Pitch / Long Term Career Planning

By Emily Young MA ‘16 

An elevator pitch is a speech designed to capture someone’s attention and answer the universal question “tell me about yourself.”  In about 30-45 seconds, the length of an elevator ride, you should get across who you are and what you aspire to become. 

Seems simple right?  And for a while it was.  "Hi, I’m Emily Young a sophomore volleyball player at USC studying in Marshall School of Business; and I aspire to go into the sports industry.“  It gets the job done, but it wasn’t until I applied for admission to the Annenberg graduate degree that I was challenged to make it better.

Late in my sophomore year, I started looking into applying for a progressive Master’s degree.  I attended an informational meeting and Dr. Baroffio, now my advisor, shared that a progressive master’s degree wasn’t going to benefit you if you didn’t have a set career path.  One of the qualifications for applying is writing a paper outlining your career goals and how each course in your proposed course plan would help you towards that goal.

I walked out of the meeting a little stunned.  I knew the program was the right fit for me, but I only had completed one internship and ultimately had no idea what I wanted to do.  I was 19 and everyone kept telling me I had plenty of time.  Now, I had a couple of weeks.

One of my favorite classes at USC was Brand Management and New Product Development.  Our teacher, Professor Wilbur, was the Brand Manager of Barbie at Mattel.  I really enjoyed the brand integration process as well as the other roles a brand manager has of marketing, advertising, development, and sales.  I talked with her about her experience at Mattel and ultimately decided I wanted to do the same thing in the sports industry. 

Now my elevator pitch is:  “Hi I’m Emily Young, a graduate student at University of Southern California.  In 5-7 years I aspire to be a brand manager of a leading sports company because I am interested in brand integration, marketing, corporate sponsorships, and advertising and as a USC DI athlete my passion is in sports.”  If the person has already introduced their role, I ask about the marketing or advertising aspect of their role or company.  Generally, people ask what sport I play or are impressed and compliment me on having a direction at such a young age. 

Having a powerful elevator speech has opened a lot of doors for me, but its creation was driven by having a distinct long-term career goal.  If you can clearly communicate what you want to do and find ways to connect it to any industry, people are willing to share their experiences to help you achieve your goals.  Don’t be afraid to make your long-term career goal or elevator speech a bit of a reach.  It might not feel true and authentic until you get a chance to work in the industry you aspire to be in, but if you have the right pitch, you’ll eventually get there.