The article was originally published on LinkedIn by Kavan Antani.
You’re a designer in the early days of your career. Applying for jobs, restructuring your portfolio, sitting for interviews and of course, dwelling on landing that dream job. If you’ve sat for enough interviews or envisioned yourself interacting with prospective employers, you’ve probably found yourself saying or thinking things similar to…
“I do not qualify for this role as I was not able to get the right experience till now”.
or
“I am excited by the space this company is in but it’s just that I’ve never gotten an opportunity to do something similar yet”.
What do you do in such a scenario? As a candidate, you can’t put all the blame on yourself as companies often avoid hiring freshers. And at the same time, you can’t put all the blame on the company as experienced professionals come with greater efficiency (well, mostly ?)
This gives rise to a chicken and egg problem where companies prefer hiring experienced professionals but are unable to find them easily. Then again, it’s not so easy to find them since freshers are unable to get the needed experience – as most companies don’t hire them and invest enough in their training.
So what do you do? How does a fresher prove her mettle before she even takes up an opportunity?
I may not have a perfect answer for this, especially in domains like sales, marketing, strategy, HR etc…
However, when it comes to designers and creators, we are lucky! This is because we have what I call the “Designer Advantage”.
So what is this advantage? Put simply, it is the unique ability to showcase your merit in whatever skill you wish to pursue, that too all by yourself! Let’s break it down!
Easy assessment of your skill
What’s unique to creators and designers is that you can visually display most, if not all of your skills. Good design portfolios document everything from the initial problem to the final solution. It’s much simpler for a potential recruiter to judge your skills and strengths as compared to judging a fresher applying for a sales role.
This can also prove to be a double-edged sword as you can be critiqued easily. But in my opinion, as a designer, isn’t feedback always a good thing?
Change your domain specialization easily
It’s far easier for a Graphic, Product or UI Designer to switch to UX than for a marketing student to jump to a strategy position. This is because you can learn by yourself (most of the content is free or cheap), make your own briefs, come up with solutions and present them! With this approach, you can be eligible for a fresher/Jr. opportunity in a new domain. Of course, this does not place you at par with a UX student who has invested years into his knowledge and expertise but it brings you quite close. This sort of flexibility is something young professionals from other fields of work can only dream of!
No dependency
Ideas and concepts never come with dependences. You can form strategies, processes, and policies but one can rarely implement them all by themselves. But if an enthusiastic creator wants to come up with a 360-degree campaign for Red Bull, for instance, she can! All she needs is her designer mind, a machine, and lots of time. Having said this, it does not mean that creators do not have dependencies. The more complex the project, the more are the dependencies. In fact, some of the most ambitious creative projects are backed by a team of experts who work tirelessly to add value to each other’s expertise. However, the point I am trying to convey is that unlike other professions, getting started with a project is less of a difficulty for creators. For example, a young student in the events space can only think of working on a grand award function of indie creators. He can come up with various concept notes and processes but his potential employers will still find it hard to judge if he can take the real world pressures and challenges to execute one. Compare this scenario with a young designer trying to apply for a design position in the same event company. With enough time, she can come up with the brand and its guidelines, space design concepts, promo videos, channel packaging as well as a branded site, all on her own!
So fellow designers and creators, especially the young ones, please make the most of your advantage! Do not wait for the “right opportunity” to come to you. Ideate, experiment, fail and learn. If you invest your time in the kind of work you want to do, it’s only a matter of time before the right opportunity materializes for you.
The article was originally published on LinkedIn by Kavan Antani.
