Her professional history includes over 150 job titles in 55 years. Her resume spans twenty pages. She’s crashed through a number of plastic ceilings, and now she has a brand new LinkedIn page full of advice for girls who are moving up the career ladder.
Yes, we know she’s plastic and her fingers don’t move, but with her new role as ‘dream incubator’, the plastic doll known as Barbie is pitching herself as a woman empowering young girls, and we reckon there are a few key lessons we can glean from her experience.
Get a mentor
According to Barbie’s LinkedIn page, this is her most important career tip. Finding and connecting with someone in your field, particularly when you’re starting out, can be incredibly beneficial in helping to navigate your career, figure out your goals, and put you on track for long-term career progress.
Be persistent
Barbie credits Ruth Handler as her ultimate inspiration, “It would be no exaggeration to say she made me the doll I am”, she writes on her page. And there are certainly a few things things to learn from Handler’s career.
An innovator, businesswoman and co-president of Mattel Inc, Handler was also the woman who conceived the idea of the plastic adult doll known as Barbie. She was a woman in business during a time when the idea of a woman in business was almost inconceivable, and she received plenty of knock backs and jibes when she took her toy doll to buyers. But Handler was persistent. It took her nearly three years, but she finally convinced Mattel to make the doll. To date, Barbie has been sold approximately 1 billion times, and has become the bestselling fashion doll in every major global market, with worldwide annual sales topping $1.9 billion.
Your packaging matters
We’ve spoken a number of times about the importance of showcasing your personal brand, and it’s clear that Barbie has nailed this. Barbie’s LinkedIn mission statement is short, clear and to the point (and maybe she’s got an entire marketing team behind her to craft the words but that doesn’t mean you can’t take something away from that too). Sell yourself clearly, and utilise your social media presence.
You don’t always have to stick to one career path
OK, so trying out 150 different jobs might be a bit of a stretch for the average professional woman, but with studies showing that we can expect to have between 15- 20 jobs in our professional lifetime, there’s certainly some merit in trying out different things to keep challenging yourself and growing professionally.
Innovation is important in remaining relevant and experimenting with different career paths is guaranteed to build up a strong skill base and offer different experiences — or at the very least, it’ll help you figure out what you don’t want to.
Support other women
Barbie has been derided for being bad for young woman’s self-esteem, but judging by her LinkedIn page — and perhaps a clever marketing ploy to counteract those negative claims — Barbie is all about giving back. Her page showcases a number of female entrepreneurs, women like Reshma Saujani of Girls Who Code, Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss of the Rent the Runway, who she calls ‘Chief Inspiration Officers’ and who will offer advice to up and coming female entrepreneurs.
Dream BIG
Again, it might be a bit of a stretch to go from Miss America to race car driver to five-time presidential candidate after a stint as a paediatrician, but that’s not to say that having big ideas shouldn’t be limited to one path, as a number of the women entrepreneurs featured on her page can attest to.