Alejandra Gonzalez learned English from a sitcom and built a career selling chicken across 40 countries

The job listing wanted a finished bachelor's degree. Alejandra Gonzalez had half of one, a full-time position at a bank in El Salvador, and English she had assembled mostly from watching Friends. Coca-Cola was hiring managers, and the role came with better benefits than the one she had. She read the requirements, decided she did not meet them, and applied anyway.

She got the job. Two decades later, that decision looks less like luck and more like a method. Gonzalez is now Chief Marketing Officer for KFC Latin America & Caribbean at Yum! Brands, running the fried-chicken business across roughly 40 countries from the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area. The path from a teller's window to a regional marketing chair ran through beer, diapers, soft drinks, pizza and chicken - and every step started the same way, with an application she was not quite ready to send.

A degree she paid for herself

The bank job was not a career plan. It was a necessity. Her father had lost his work in the middle of her studies, so Gonzalez covered her own tuition, holding down a full week while finishing a degree that was still, technically, unfinished when Coca-Cola's opening appeared. Most people would have waited to graduate. She read the same requirement everyone else did and made a different call.

"They wanted you to have a bachelor degree, and I was in the middle of my degree still," she has said. "But I was like, let me apply, and we'll see if it works."

That line has become the closest thing she has to a philosophy. The point is not that qualifications do not matter. It is that the gap between what a listing asks for and what you can actually do tends to close on the job, not before it. She talks often about how women read the same posting men do and talk themselves out of it. Her advice is blunt: stop underestimating yourself, and apply for the thing that looks out of reach.

A marketing passport

Read her career as a list and it looks scattered. Read it as a training program and it makes sense. She sold key accounts at SABMiller and moved brands at Kimberly-Clark. She ran the marketing calendar and innovation pipeline for Chili's at Brinker International in Dallas. In 2020 she joined Yum! Brands to lead marketing, innovation and partnerships for Pizza Hut across Latin America and Iberia, then moved to the KFC business for the region. Along the way she picked up an MBA in international management, marketing and finance in Barcelona.

The categories change; the underlying job does not. Every one of those products lives or dies on whether an ordinary person, standing in a store or scrolling a phone, feels something. Moving between beer and diapers and pizza is not a lack of focus. It is a way of learning how many different people buy for how many different reasons.

Let them pitch in Portuguese

One habit says more about her leadership than any title. Her region includes Brazil, and some of her agencies work in Portuguese. When a Brazilian team has to present to a corporate American brand, the unspoken expectation is that they perform in English. Gonzalez, who learned enough Portuguese to follow along, waves that away. When they present to her for approval, she lets them do it in their own language.

"I know the confidence that comes when you're presenting in your first language," she has said. "It helps people really thrive." It is a small accommodation with a large logic behind it. A marketer who once walked into a Coca-Cola interview armed with sitcom English knows exactly how much of a person's ability gets hidden when they are fighting the words instead of using them.

Knowing what you stand for

For someone who advises people to leap before they are ready, Gonzalez is unusually disciplined about direction. She credits a lot of her sharpest choices - in work and in life - to being clear about her own priorities before anyone asked her to justify them.

"I have made decisions that through the eyes of other people were completely wrong, because I was really clear about what my journey was," she has said. The two ideas fit together better than they first appear. Applying for a stretch role is easy when you already know the direction you are stretching in. The applications look reckless only to people who cannot see the map she is following.

There is a softer note underneath the ambition, too. Asked what she would tell her younger self, she does not reach for a bigger goal. She reaches for the brakes. Twenty years in, she says she would love to return to the first phase of her career - not to redo it, but to slow it down, to stop racing to the next title long enough to notice the one she was in.

It is an unusual thing for a chief marketing officer to admit out loud - that the most valuable skill she is still working on is presence, not speed. The bank teller who applied before she was ready has spent a career proving the leap works. What she is teaching now, mostly to younger women who see themselves as underqualified, is the part that comes after the leap: keep your accent, know your direction, and do not disappear into the room you fought so hard to enter.

From a bank window in San Salvador to a brand that shows up in 40 countries, the résumé keeps growing. The instruction she leaves behind is smaller and easier to carry. Know what you stand for. Then apply.