After two years, one month and 12 days as an editorial assistant, I am free of that lowly title. I have finally—finally!—gotten a promotion. Pleaseallow me to introduce myself: I’m Sunny Sea Gold, assistant editor at Glamour magazine. I’d give you my card, but they haven’t come in from the printers yet. You’ll have to take a rain check.
So, how’d I make it happen? First of all, I put in the time—about twice as much as I thought I’d have to. See, my mentors—all in their late 20s and early 30s—were leaping from magazine to magazine in the bull market of the ‘90s, climbing another notch (or two) up the masthead every year. Naturally, I thought I would too. But things have changed, honey. There’s lesson number one: be patient. The economy sucks and the competition for jobs is seriously stiff, which means no one’s moving around and your employer knows you’re not in a huge hurry to quit if you don’t get a title change.
But (lesson number two) I didn’t just sit there sweetly answering phones, waiting for the promotion fairy to tap me with her wand. I asked for more, more, more
work from every editor on staff. “Need any help with the news section?
I can do interviews.” “Need someone to watch over that page for you
while you’re on vacation? I can do it.” An assistant editor seemed a bit
overwhelmed with her workload, so I offered to share her less-than-glamorous
responsibility of editing the magazine’s weekly e-mail newsletter and—bam!—my
first editing gig. It’s not like I was begging for more newspapers to clip or
packages to messenger, but if it was new to me, I jumped at the chance to take
it on—even if it meant working late most nights, which I did.
Soon I was editing that newsletter, the table of contents and two
front-of-book department pages, while still assisting two very busy editors—you
know phones, faxes, copies, expenses, all that good stuff.
I was already doing the job of an assistant editor, so when the day came
that our managing editor—who’s in charge of personnel issues and promotions on
our staff—called me into her office, eyes sparkling, looking conspiratorial, I
thought, Hooray! But it turned out that she wanted me to take on editing our web
site, glamour.com—a big job, requiring a lot of planning and attention to
detail. I was flattered, but couldn’t hide my disappointment that I wasn’t
being promoted.
Lesson number three: Be honest. I
told her, Yes, of course I’ll edit the web site, and thank you so much for
asking me to do it—but if I seem unhappy, it’s because I thought this talk was
going to be about a promotion. She told me that would have to wait until my
annual review, but if I took on the web site and excelled, we could talk about moving
up my review date (then nine months away).
I didn’t let her forget that promise. A couple of months later I
e-mailed her a gentle reminder: “I’m just checking in with you about the
possibility of moving up my review date. Any word?” And again a couple of
months after that. And another couple of months after that. Then I put it in
pen and ink: on a piece of Glamour
stationary, I made a list of everything I did for the magazine (quite a list)
with a note to her saying I didn’t want to be presumptuous, but I really did
want to check in about my annual review. (Lesson
four: be persistent, but humble.)
She said thank you and assured me she hadn’t forgotten.
Just a few weeks later, it happened: the managing editor and the
executive editor called me in for a chat. They were both beaming as they told
me what my new title (assistant editor!) and salary (which I don’t want to talk
about!) would be. They were genuinely happy for me—and I felt relieved,
appreciated and ready to work even harder.
There’s a fine line between pushing too
hard and being a pushover—and I think I toed it. Think I waited around for too
long? Not for a spot at that magazine (12 million readers, anyone?) in this
market.
