The Garden Stage powered by Somersby | Saturday | 3:40 PM
Marketing looks beautifully organised from a lecture hall. The lectures seem informative, the frameworks all make sense and every case study seems to suggest that good thinking gets recognised fairly quickly. Then you walk into your first interview, hear three job titles you have never seen before, get asked about tools nobody mentioned at university and quickly realise the industry has its own dialect that you weren’t aware of.
That gap between what students are taught and what junior talent actually runs into is where most of the confusion begins. How much of what you learned really helps once the work starts? What do interviews actually look like when nobody is pretending? What makes one intern easy to trust with real tasks while another stays stuck doing admin?
In this student-focused session, young professionals who crossed that line very recently will give you what they learned the hard way so you don’t have to. Zara Bangoura (Junior Consultant, EY Croatia, Member of IAB Croatia), Alen Bajrić (Co-founder, FOMO Agency) and Kristian Marinić (Co-Founder, FOMO Agency), moderated by our very own Marin Vlainić (Head of Community, HURA & IAB Croatia), will talk through first jobs, first rejections, first internships, early mistakes and the habits that helped them get taken seriously faster. The goal is simple: a clearer sense of how the industry actually works when the syllabus ends and the career begins.
