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Ever since she was a young girl, Social Media Manager Kym Francis has been a sports fanatic.
Growing up, she loved watching sport on television with her family, going to dance classes on weekends and cheering on her beloved Cronulla Sharks at every opportunity she had.
As a uni student, Kym was determined to turn her passion for sport into her profession. After starting a Bachelor of Arts, she transferred to a Media and Communications degree, hoping to one day enter the exciting world of sports journalism.
More specifically, Kym had her heart set on joining our Fox Sports team, having been a long-time customer with an appreciation for the quality of sports broadcasting the brand is widely known for.
After graduation, Kym kept a look out for opportunities to work at Fox Sports and stumbled upon a job opening at Foxtel Media, the Foxtel Group’s advertising agency responsible for creating innovative brand experiences for customers.
“I always wanted to end up at Fox Sports and I knew Foxtel Media had an affiliation, so I put my hand up for the role,” she says.
This is where Kym began her career as a Digital Sports Partnership Coordinator. “On day one I had no idea what I was doing,” she jokes, looking back at how she got her foot in the door.
Her positive attitude and optimistic outlook led Kym to embrace any and all tasks that came her way, and helped her develop skills in digital marketing, television marketing, creative campaigns, videography and graphics. Even though she didn’t officially work at Fox Sports, she still got to work on Fox Sports products and work from the live broadcast studios in Artarmon every now and then.
Kym credits this early exposure to multiple aspects of the business, along with her bubbly, social and confident personality, as the secret ingredient to her success. In just over a year, she was promoted to Sports Partnerships Executive, then again to Sports Partnerships Manager just another year later.
Her rapid trajectory from new starter to manager came from hard work and diligence, but also from having an incredibly supportive team.
“There’s a huge teamwork ethic in the sports team at Foxtel Media. There’s not a huge amount of competitiveness. We like to do things as a team and celebrate as a team,” she says.
It was this great workplace culture that convinced Kym to stay at Foxtel Media rather than pursue a move across to Fox Sports as her career progressed. This comradery also formed a crucial support foundation for her throughout her first pregnancy and maternity leave period too.
The team, and her clients, were happy to have her back though when she returned to work, taking on the brand-new role of Social Media Manager.
Now she’s leveraging all her experience to change the game in her field, where no two days are the same. Kym might find herself balancing social media and commercial priorities, looking at how she can grow revenue for the business and her partners, creating innovative campaigns, coming up with creative competitions and facilitating collaborations across the Group.
She loves how much flexibility she has, not just in her autonomy to get her job done in new and experimental ways, but also in terms of the team’s ways of working. With the support of her manager, she’s established work/life balance that allows her to continue growing her career while raising her baby.
Without a doubt, Kym’s life and career have changed and evolved over the years, just as the Foxtel Group has itself. There are some obvious parallels between the two as well, such as a willingness to try new things, determination to pursue ambitious goals, and a level of quiet confidence that sets them both apart from the crowd.
Now, five years after starting out as that junior who “had no idea” what she was doing, Kym is determined to mentor those who come after her, particularly young women in media.
Her advice for forging an amazing career journey at the Foxtel Group is clear: “Don’t put pressure on yourself to know everything. Coordinator positions give you foundation and when you move on, you can mentor those under you. You get to work with different parts of the business, like production and editorial, and you can see what you like and don’t like. Put your hands up for lots of experiences too!”
Congratulations, Kym, on five incredible years with the Foxtel Group and thank you for sharing your amazing story with us.