Who needs self-promotion when your boss will do it for you?!

So as many of you know I have been applying for jobs around campus and had a great lead with our business school - to the point that they called me to apply for one of their job postings. I went in for an interview, everything went really well, my newer job duties at my current job really stood out...yada yada yada...I have heard nothing. And that was over a month ago.

Cut to two weeks ago, a coworker who knew I had applied told the head honcho of my office about it and he seemed unaware and concerned about the possibility of me leaving (this is secondhand from my coworker).

Cut to last week when my boss' boss calls me into her office and offers me a promotion to coordinator in charge of all social media and telecounseling duties for our admissions office! With a raise! So I will no longer be an Admissions Counselor traveling to high schools. This is definitely a better option than the business school considering my interest areas in social media. So cut to yesterday when I signed the paperwork for my new position :) no announcement has been made in my office yet but I am excited for my new role for two main reasons.

1) during my campus tour info sessions I mention a statistic I picked up that says today's college graduates will have an average of 9 jobs/careers before they retire and 4 of the jobs don't even exist yet. Most universities worry about that since their main function is to prepare students for the work force, but how can they do that if they don't even know what skills are needed for those yet-to-be-created jobs?! Well in my spiel I go into how our university covers a broad skills education that makes our graduates more adaptable to the ever-changing job market and guess what? Now I am proof that what I say is true (of course I always believed it was true but I didn't have such a convenient example), because I could not have foreseen this job when I graduated yet I do think my PR background helps me.

2) my graduate school advisor was always pushing us to come up with our own value-add to higher education. In other words, why are you invaluable to your organization and what do you bring to the organization that is unique and irreplaceable. I hated that question because as someone starting out in their career I was just trying to soak up enough information to do my job well, not be the best at it and I couldn't think of what made me stand out. Of course I also didn't think creating a student-friendly (AKA not personal) facebook account and diving into twitter was all that groundbreaking and yet, I have been the only person in our office consistently looking at social media as a way to connect with students. The good news is that my bosses saw my value-add and decided I shouldn't leave to work for one of the colleges and literally created a new job to keep me within the organization. How cool is that!?! Turns out my grad advisor really does know what she is talking about :) she is also the person that told me I really could make my final project about the use of Twitter in the classroom.

I am really excited for my new job but boy, I sure do have to do a lot of planning to make our social media strategies look spontaneous!! It's a full-time job!