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Starting a career during a crisis was not all rainbows and unicorns - perseverance, openness and adaptability are what got me where I am today in my life
After high school, I moved from Italy to France for a student exchange program, teaching conversational Italian to high school students.
It was a great experience, however I loved studying and learning, so I moved back to Italy and got my bachelor's in Communication & Media studies in 2005.
After graduation, I started my master's in Marketing Management.
The speed at which the Internet was changing the whole world taught me more than what I was learning at uni. As a consequence, I decided not to complete my master's and start working.
In 2006 I moved to Spain for a Leonardo postgrad internship at a publishing house, and I worked there until 2007. If I had stayed in Madrid, my internship would have turned into a job, as they had already extended me an offer. Nonetheless, I decided to go back to Italy for love.
Would I do it again? I'll never know - unless somebody figures out how to explore alternative realities during my lifetime, of course!
As I returned to Italy, I understood that no matter how many CVs I would send, the offers were too few and for incredibly low salaries.
That's when it hit me: we were in the middle of a global financial crisis, the scariest after the Great Depression.
I was afraid I would not be able to find a job qukicly, so I reached out to the Spanish publishing house and asked my boss if he had already found someone to replace me.
Luckily for me he hadn't, and I offered to manage the company website remotely, as I knew both the company and my way around the website. He said yes.
That experience taught me a lot about international remote work, flexible work hours and stakeholder management in a time of crisis, when Slack and Google Hangouts hadn't even been invented yet.
I knew I was good at networking, copywriting and communication, and I used my experience with the Spanish website as a selling point to find additional sources of income: back then, most Italian small businesses didn't really know how to create an online presence, and as I had observed, experimented with, and learnt about the online world, I had a strategic advantage.
I reached out to friends and acquaintances to see if the companies where they were working would be interested in an online presence Tech advisor.
Two companies accepted: a consultant comes with less strings attached than an employee.
In exchange for providing good quality, yet affordable services, I managed to negotiate the possibility to work from home at the pace I wanted, committing to always deliver on time.
In a matter of months, I became those companies' go-to online presence Tech advisor and they began to request even more and different services.
During that time, I had the great opportunity to learn a lot of different skills: SEO, frontend programming, social media management, ebook layout design, PR and event management, as well as digital photography.
At that point, word of mouth had helped me a lot, and as my client base grew organically and substantially (my biggest client was the bank UniCredit Group), I set up my own company and managed to make the most out of those crisis years by establishing myself as an online communication expert and project manager.
In 2011, Airbnb reached out to me - after stumbling upon my online photo portfolio - and offered me a job as a freelance photographer.
I realised that I could leverage the relevance of their brand to boost my own, using it as an additional selling point and thus adjusting my rates. Most clients welcomed the upgrade, since I was reliable and professional, and the connection to Airbnb was further proof of that.
My job as a project manager and Tech advisor already had a solid foundation, and the one as a photographer was picking up fast. I was in a good place.
Alas, the 5 years following the crisis hit the economy much harder than the crisis itself and, as a reflection of that, the nature of some competitors began to rapidly change: they were more affordable than me, because while I was happy to pay taxes and contribute to bettering society, they would rather offer their services and cheat with their invoicing :/
This kind of competition is hard to beat, unless you want to play the dirty game of tax evasion. I didn't want to.
Yet one more reason why I decided to move away from Italy. Once again.
In 2013 I reached out to friends abroad, and one of them was living and working in Stockholm, where his employer, Schibsted, was looking for a multi-language community manager for an early stage startup within their New Ventures branch.
After three Skype calls and my first ever trip to Scandinavia, I got the job!
A few weeks later, my whole life was packed in a few suitcases and boxes and I was flying to Sweden with my one-way ticket.