Alumni Spotlight: Fernando Valdes
Advertising alum Fernando Valdes (B.A. '09) leveraged the broad skillset Meadows equipped him with to tailor his own career path in a consumer-focused industry.
Fernando Valdes (B.A. ’09) is this week’s featured alum in our new Alumni Spotlight series for the This Week at Meadows e-newsletter. Each week, a different Meadows alum will be highlighted for their accomplishments post-graduation.
Meadows strives to ensure that its graduates are prepared for their post-college life and equips them with a broad skillset in their particular area of study. Though Fernando Valdes, an alum of the Division of Advertising, graduated when the job market was not at its best, he was able to land a role at an advertising startup thanks to his experience at Meadows. Having honed a variety of skills during his time in the advertising program, he was an asset to the company in his ability to work across many different roles.
“Being able to contribute in such a way allowed me to apply my skills across web design, account planning, and media planning,” explains Valdes. “Each of these areas required different skills I had learned at Meadows, and this hands-on experience helped me quickly realize what I loved doing and what I wanted to keep improving.”
This early, broad exposure allowed Valdes to tailor his own career path and eventually led him to his current role as the Head of Global Sales Compensation at Uber Eats. In this position, he leads the team that designs incentive plans for all the Uber Eats sellers and account managers worldwide with the goal of designing, implementing, and managing performance-based sales compensation plans that motivate sellers across all lines of business.
Understanding consumer behavior and preferences is invaluable in his current job and while Valdes is no longer in the advertising industry, many of the courses he took during his time in the program that touched on these topics, like Dr. Alice Kendrick’s Account Planning course, have been highly influential throughout his career.
“Whether I was crafting strategies for clients or designing incentive plans at Uber Eats, being able to identify audience insights has helped me build effective, customer-focused approaches,” he says.
With Meadows offering a wide variety of courses, Valdes was able to choose classes that truly interested him and also aligned with his major, such as Account Planning, Media Planning, Investigative Journalism, and Personality Psychology. This ultimately resulted in providing him a broad range of knowledge that he could apply to jobs throughout his career.
“The skills and perspectives I gained from these diverse areas while at Meadows have allowed me to stand out in every role I’ve taken on.”