Despite my general dislike of big corporations, there is merit to the "management trainee" program, especially for fresh graduates. It exposes fresh graduates to many aspects of the business so they can form a more holistic understanding of how each part works together to become a functioning enterprise.

In a startup, since everyone's wearing multiple hats at any one time, new joiners are often undergoing a similar "management trainee" program without having the fancy title and meticulously designed system. This is especially true for non-engineering roles like CS, Marketing, and Sales.

By joining a startup, you have to expect to do all kinds of things – demo calls, respond to customer inquiries, prepare sales presentations, design marketing graphics, copywriting, etc. And regardless of your original intention of joining the startup, this rotation of tasks is good for you.

Why?

Because you want to be a T-Shaped Professional.

Let's take marketing for example. Many companies now prefer to hire for the "T-shaped Marketer" more than just a simple copywriter or designer.

When you're a T-shaped professional, you have solid grasp of the base layer:

1. Statistics
2. Programming
3. Product Design
4. Analytics
5. Behavioural Psychology
6. Branding & Storytelling

This base knowledge layer is extremely important and will help you succeed no matter which field you decide to specialise later on. They are transferable across disciplines and industries.

Then, you develop a solid grasp of the next marketing foundational layer:

1. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
2. A/B Testing
3. DB Querying
4. Wireframing
5. Excel Modeling
6. Copywriting
7. Funnel Marketing

This layer is evergreen and will rarely change within the realms of Marketing, but might not be as transferable across disciplines.

The final layer is the channel expertise layer:

1. FB Ads
2. Viral Marketing
3. Display Ads
4. Mobile
5. Email
6. PR
7. PPC
8. SEO
9. Offline Advertising
10. Push Notification
11. Content Marketing
12. Social
13. Social
14. Sales
15. Partnerships
16. Others..

This layer changes throughout time. As old channels decay and new ones come to replace them, you have to evolve with the times and experiment with new channels alongside optimising current channels that are consistently bringing results.

Just by being inside a startup, you can be exposed to many different aspects of a growing business. Without solid development systems in place and abundant resources, you need to get creative and develop on your own.

Get creative and initiate!

While doing all of the execution, you will slowly grasp the fundamentals further down the base layers and bring them everywhere you go — making you extremely valuable as an early-stage employee or even as co-founder in a new startup.