Seven years in advertising, arriving in Dubai next week on a visit visa, and quietly terrified. What should I actually be doing?
I joined an agency seven years ago when there was no sales function and built it up from nothing. Cold outreach, pitching, running the accounts afterwards, holding things together when a project fell apart. Somewhere in there I became the person who wrote the tender and RFP responses for the big institutional clients, the long unglamorous documents nobody else wanted to touch.
I was good at it. That is not me boasting, it is the only thing keeping me steady right now, because everything else about this move has gone differently than I planned.
I arrive next week on a visit visa. I need an employer to sponsor me. I have about sixty days, and I have done the arithmetic on what I have left more times than is useful. There are people at home who are counting on this, and I have started keeping my calls with them shorter than I used to, because I do not want them to hear anything in my voice.
Every conversation so far ends the same way. New to Dubai, budget is 5k. I have been saying I cannot go below 8, and each time I say it I sound more certain than I feel. What has been hardest is not the number itself. It is sitting on a call being told, politely, that seven years does not count for very much here, and then getting off the call and having no idea whether they are right.
Maybe they are. That is genuinely why I am posting.
If you had sixty days, where would you actually put your hours. Recruiters, or direct to founders, or something else entirely. Does that newcomer number move once you are physically in the room, or is it fixed until you have local experience on paper. Does a visit visa kill applications outright, or only at the companies that were never going to move fast. And would you take freelance or project work first to buy some time, or does that make you look unserious.
I am aiming at independent agencies and production houses rather than the networks. Smaller places, closer to the work.
If anyone in advertising or production is up for a coffee, I would be glad of the company as much as the advice, and I will come to wherever you are.
Mostly I would just like someone who has stood where I am standing to tell me what they wish they had known. Thanks for reading this far.