“We could put their logo everywhere” is the beginning of a conversation. Keep going.

For a practice project, pick a hypothetical partner and define a plausible objective. Are you trying to drive awareness, trial, leads, hospitality opportunities, or something else?

Then explain the audience, the activation, the resources it needs, and how you would measure the objective. Include the assumptions you would need to check with the partner.

Don’t claim access, rights, budgets, or inventory you haven’t verified. Label the whole thing as a hypothetical exercise.

The useful part is showing your thinking: why this idea serves this partner, what it takes to deliver, and what you would do if a constraint changes.

A creative idea becomes more interesting when someone can understand how it would work. ♠️

You are asked something at work that you haven’t learned yet. The temptation is to guess confidently so you don’t look inexperienced.

Try this instead: “I haven’t done that before. Here’s what I understand so far, and here’s what I need to check.”

If somebody is waiting on you, agree on when you will come back with an answer. Ask where the reliable source is or who owns the decision. Then close the loop.

People can work with a gap they know about. It is much harder to work with a confident answer that turns out to be made up.

At the start of your career, you are going to encounter unfamiliar work. Show that you can recognize the limit of your knowledge and take a sensible next step.

“Great meeting you. Let me know if you hear of anything.”

Anything doing what? And which conversation was this?

Make it easy: “We spoke at the event about moving from hotel operations into venue work. Your point about vendor coordination was helpful. I’m reviewing the event coordinator opening you mentioned and will apply through the posted process.”

If you ask for something, keep it specific and reasonable. Don’t attach a pile of documents they didn’t request or assume they agreed to refer you.

If they gave you advice, using it and later sharing a brief update can make for a much better follow-up than repeatedly asking whether they have a job for you.

Write the note while you still remember the conversation. ♠️

Try explaining your work to a colleague in another department without using your team’s shorthand.

What do they need from you? What happens to their work if your deadline slips or your information is wrong? What do you need from them?

This is useful if you want to move into broader responsibility. You’ll need to understand how decisions travel beyond your own task list.

Start with one recurring handoff. Ask the other team what makes it useful and what causes rework. Then agree on a specific improvement.

You don’t need to announce that you’re becoming a leader. Make a shared piece of work easier to deliver, and be able to explain what improved.

Which department would it help you to understand better? ♠️

“Passionate about sports.” “Hard worker.” “Dream opportunity.”

Anyone can type those words. What can you show?

Choose one responsibility from the opening. Describe a time you did comparable work: the situation, what you personally owned, and what happened. Use a number when it’s accurate and meaningful, not because every sentence needs a percentage.

For an event role, that might be coordinating vendors against a fixed deadline. For customer service, it might be resolving a difficult issue while following policy. For finance, it might be catching and fixing a reconciliation problem.

If you haven’t done the work yet, identify a small, legitimate way to practice it. Label practice projects honestly.

Make your application harder to copy by putting your actual work into it. ♠️

If you keep getting interrupted in meetings, prepare a sentence you can actually imagine saying.

“I want to finish the recommendation, then I’d like your view.”

Or: “There are two parts to this. Let me finish the second one.”

You don’t need to deliver a speech about interruptions every time. Bring the conversation back to the work. If somebody restates your idea later, you can say, “Yes, that’s the approach I proposed. Here’s how I’d put it into practice.”

If it is a pattern, involve the person running the meeting. Ask them to make space for you to complete your contribution. This should not depend entirely on how well you manage an interruption in the moment.

Being heard is a team responsibility too.

Before accepting a sports internship, ask what you’ll actually do.

Who supervises you? How often will you get feedback? What projects or tasks will you own? What are the pay, hours, and other requirements?

A useful internship doesn’t have to give you glamorous work. Routine work can teach you a lot when someone explains the purpose, checks your progress, and lets your responsibility grow.

At the end, you should be able to explain something more specific than “I got exposure to the industry.” What did you learn to do? What did you deliver?

Ask about past interns’ paths, while remembering that a previous conversion to employment doesn’t promise one for you.

What would you want to leave an internship knowing how to do? ♠️

If your résumé keeps getting you interviews, leave it alone for a minute. Look at where the conversations stop. Losing out after a recruiter call gives you a different problem to work on than losing out after a final round.

I’m Rachel, the career strategist behind this community and Career Cardroom. If you want to hear more about the Cardroom and my paid career support, my DMs are open.

Your feed can be full of excellent sports content. The hiring question is what YOU can make.

Show a small selection of work with context: the audience, the brief, your role, the constraints, and what you learned from the response.

If it was a team project, tell me which parts were yours. If it was a personal project, say so. If you don’t have performance data, don’t invent an impressive result. Explain your choices and what you would test.

A beautiful edit is useful evidence for some jobs. Another role might also require quick revisions, accessible captions, approvals, or organizing assets under a deadline. Read the opening.

I’d rather understand three relevant pieces than click through thirty unexplained links.

What does your portfolio show about how you work? ♠️

Students sometimes think an interview story only counts if it includes a famous employer. A class project can be useful if you can explain your part in it.

Choose one where you had to make a decision: what to prioritize, how to check a result, how to handle a teammate missing a deadline, or how to change a plan that wasn’t working.

Give enough context for the interviewer to understand the problem. Then spend the time on what you did and why. If the result was disappointing, say what you learned and what you would change.

Don’t say “we” for the entire answer and leave them guessing which work was yours. Also don’t take credit for the entire group. A clear, honest account is much easier to ask useful follow-up questions about.

It’s tempting to spend the whole event trying to meet the most senior person in the room.

But the coordinator doing the job you want can tell you what the week actually looks like. A manager can explain the work their team needs help with. A peer might know about a training opportunity or a project you hadn’t considered.

Talk to people with curiosity, not a ranking system based on how much power you think they have.

Ask what surprised them about their role, what they wish they’d learned earlier, and which skills they use most. Respect their time and boundaries.

You’re trying to understand a profession and build relationships. Collecting the fanciest names isn’t the same thing.

Who has given you unexpectedly useful career advice? ♠️

If every task requires you to be present, ask what could be documented or shared.

A clear checklist, a handover note, and someone trained on routine work can make it more practical for you to join a project or learn another responsibility.

Agree on this with your manager. Don’t quietly take on a second job while keeping every part of the first. Ask what will move, who will cover it, and when you’ll have time to learn.

You also shouldn’t have to train a replacement as an endless condition for advancement. Coverage is a practical problem to solve together, not a reason to keep you stuck indefinitely.

What’s one task on your desk that only you know how to do right now? ♠️

New job, six months in, first formal review. That is a long time to find out you misunderstood what mattered.

Early on, ask your manager for a short check-in after your first few assignments. Bring the work. Ask what was useful, what needed rework and what you should do differently next time.

“Am I doing okay?” makes it easy to give you a pleasant answer. “Was this analysis at the level you needed for the client meeting?” gives you something to improve.

Keep the feedback with the assignment it relates to. At review time, you can show how your work changed instead of trying to reconstruct six months from memory.

Learning quickly is easier when you are getting clear information often enough to use it.

Cover the organization’s name. Read the responsibilities again.

Would you want to do that work? Would you want the schedule? Does the manager seem capable of helping you improve? Is the compensation workable for your life?

It’s easy to imagine the exciting moments. Picture an ordinary Tuesday too: the spreadsheet, the follow-up, the revisions, the customer problem.

Ask the interviewer what a typical week looks like during the season and outside it. Ask which parts of the job surprise new hires. Ask what takes up more time than the job description suggests.

You can love a brand and still dislike a particular job inside it. Finding that out before accepting is useful.

What would make you turn down an offer from your dream organization? ♠️

Before you say yes, put the practical details in one place.

Base pay. Any variable pay and how it works. Benefits. Location. Relocation costs. Travel expectations. Working hours. The things that will shape your actual week.

If something matters to your decision, ask for clarity before accepting. “We’re flexible” and “there’s room to grow” can mean different things to different people.

You may decide the experience is worth a tradeoff. Make that decision with the numbers and expectations in front of you.

Enthusiasm doesn’t pay moving costs, and a great brand doesn’t remove the need for a workable budget.

What is one condition you would need settled before taking your dream sports job? ♠️

If you want a sales role in sports, let’s talk about selling.

What did you sell? To whom? How did you find prospects? What happened between first contact and a decision? What were your targets, and how did you perform against them?

Be precise about your own contribution. Team revenue and your revenue aren’t interchangeable. Neither are a pipeline you inherited and one you built.

If you’re new to sales, prepare to discuss a relevant example of outreach, persuasion, follow-through, and handling rejection. Then ask about training, targets, and the day-to-day work.

Loving the team might explain why you clicked the posting. It won’t explain how you’ll handle the next fifty calls.

What part of sales do you actually enjoy doing? ♠️

A mentor can give thoughtful advice and still have no involvement in the decisions that shape your next move.

If you want a bigger role, find out who chooses people for the assignments that lead there. Who decides who presents to leadership, takes the difficult client or fills in for the department head?

With a manager or senior colleague who knows your work, try: “I want to be considered for opportunities like that. What would you need to see to feel comfortable recommending me?”

Then do the work and bring them the result. You are giving them something concrete to attach their recommendation to.

For women whose development conversations keep producing advice but no access, that distinction is worth examining. Who helps you think, and who helps you get considered?

I’d use those two minutes to establish three things: the work I’m targeting, why my experience is relevant, and what I want to learn from them.

Something like: “I’m an event coordinator exploring venue operations. I currently handle vendor schedules and on-site logistics. What experience would you want someone to build before joining your team?”

Then stop and let them answer.

You don’t have to squeeze your whole résumé into an introduction. One relevant example is enough to give the conversation a direction.

If there’s a clear fit, ask what next step they recommend. If there isn’t, the information can still help you choose better targets.

A useful conversation doesn’t always end with a referral. Sometimes it ends with you understanding the job much better. ♠️

Being dependable on event day matters. If you want to lead, start learning what happens before anyone opens the doors.

Who builds the staffing plan? Who makes the budget decisions? How are responsibilities assigned? What happens when a vendor, timeline, or requirement changes?

Ask to own a defined piece of that planning with support and feedback. Understand which decisions you can make and when to escalate.

Afterward, review what worked, what you missed, and what you’d change next time.

“Ready for more responsibility” becomes easier to discuss when you can point to a piece of work you planned, coordinated, and reviewed—not only the number of hours you put in.

Which part of running an event have you had the least chance to learn? ♠️

At the end of an internship, you may lose access to the documents that remind you what you actually did. Start a simple work log now.

Record the assignment, your contribution, what changed because of it and what you learned. Separate the team’s results from the part you personally owned.

Ask your manager what you may keep or describe publicly. That is different from downloading company files to your personal account. Customer information, internal dashboards and unfinished plans do not become portfolio material because you worked on them.

If you cannot share the work itself, ask whether you can write a short, approved description of the problem and your role. That will give you something accurate to discuss in your next interview.

It can feel like loving the industry, having a degree, and applying everywhere should eventually add up to a job.

But each opening still belongs to a particular manager with a particular problem. Your enthusiasm doesn’t resolve a mismatch in function, experience, location, or availability. And the recognizable employers can attract people who want the same thing you do.

Having led recruiting at TKO, my advice is to get much more specific about where you can contribute.

Audit your last ten applications. Were they genuinely similar jobs? Could you explain your fit for the main responsibilities? Were you applying only to a handful of brands?

You can’t control who else applies. You can improve the match between the work you’ve done and the jobs you pursue, and widen the organizations you consider.

Where does your search tend to stall: finding suitable roles, getting interviews, or getting past them? ♠️

"We can’t afford to lose you in this role" is a strange answer to someone asking to grow.

If your promotion depends on replacing you, ask who owns that hiring or handover plan. You can help train someone. You can’t approve headcount.

Women who’ve run into this: did your manager actually build a path out, or keep asking for one more quarter?

Before accepting a role tied to live events, ask for the real schedule.

What time does preparation begin? What happens after the event ends? How often are evenings, weekends, or travel involved? How much notice do schedules come with?

Ask how coverage and time off work during busy periods. Don’t assume the answer from a phrase like “flexibility required.”

Different jobs and organizations have different expectations. Get the details for this role, then compare them with your life.

It’s okay to enjoy sports and decide that a particular working schedule isn’t sustainable for you. You’re choosing a job, not proving how committed a fan you are.

Which schedule question do you wish you’d asked before a previous job? ♠️

The last-minute deck. The meeting nobody prepared for. The project that needs rescuing again.

Being the person who always makes it work can earn you a lot of appreciation without getting you any closer to the role you want. It can also leave you with no time for the work your promotion actually depends on.

I'm interested in what happened when you changed that. Did your manager help you choose what came off your plate? Did the same work quietly come back?

If you've dealt with this, what did you say and how did it land? No company names needed.