Five Years of Experience

By Brandon Stambaugh

"Congratulations on your creative degree and good luck" is the summation of what it feels like when you're walking across the stage at graduation and facing the real world. But now what do you do? Just get a job (which isn't easy to do) and once you land a job, everything will be smooth sailing from there (not true). Unfortunately, it's not that simple. So, what do you do about that? That's what I want to help you with.  

First, let's get you into the industry. From my experience, I've found some similarities for why creatives get turned down for positions. I've laid out some common issues creatives run into while applying for jobs and you can do to tailor your pitch in order to fix them.  

Once you're in, we need to keep you in the industry. Working to become a professional creative and actually being a professional creative are two different things and the transition can be jarring initially. I have some tips and tricks that I want to share with you to help you sustain your career while dealing with the throes of life.  

It's difficult to get started as a professional, but this book may help you understand how to give yourself a better foot forward and help you understand how to keep your position once you make it there. Now let's take control of your trajectory, infiltrate the industry and sustain your career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandon Stambaugh
• Release date: Aug 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393176169

Book preview

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Copyright ©2020 by Brandon Stambaugh

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

The content of this book has been prepared for informational purposes only. Although anyone may find the ideas, concepts, practices, suggestions, recommendations, disciplines, and understanding presented in this book to be useful, the contents of this book are provided with the understanding that neither the author nor the publisher is engaged in providing any specific business advice to the reader. Nor is anything in this book intended to be a strategy or recommendation for any specific kind of business problem or business opportunity. Each person and business has unique needs, qualities, resources abilities, and other attributes and this book cannot take these individual differences into account. Each person and business should engage a qualified professional to address their or its unique situation.

Five Years of Experience: Breaking Into And Staying In The Corporate Creative Career Path

Cover design by Brandon Stambaugh

Author photo by Brandon Stambaugh

Paperback ISBN - 9781663500403

Contents

Part 1

Breaking Into The Industry

01: Intro

02: What You’re Up Against

03: Creatives Are Hard To Work With

04: Creatives Are Fragile Beyond Belief

05: Creatives Don’t Understand Business

06: Creatives Only Care About Things That Are Cool

Part 2

Staying In The Industry

07: Welcome

08: Warm Ups

09: Getting Started

10: Sustaining Your Career And Your Sanity

11: Two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood

12: Don’t Forget To Be Yourself

Works Cited

Part 01

Breaking Into The Industry

01:

Intro

Hello creatives,

Are you fresh out of college or jumping into a new career path? Well, welcome to the creative job hunt. There are so many options out there that it’s hard to figure out where to start.

I remember being there. It was the day after I graduated that I began to seriously look for jobs. I was so excited to begin my career as a Product Designer. I scoured the internet and found a huge variety of different entry-level design jobs. I was daydreaming about all of the things I could do for these various companies if I got hired, and then I ran face-first into that ever present sentence on most of the entry-level job postings; five years of experience. The job market’s you must be this tall to ride this ride’ sign. Sometimes I got lucky and they would ask for three to five years of experience but that didn’t lessen the blow. What the hell do you mean that I need five years of experience for an ENTRY-LEVEL job?

Did you know that the standard amount of experience that you’re supposed to have in order to be considered an expert in a subject is 10 years? Now look at what these companies are asking for from us. Why is it that an entry-level position requires someone to be 50% of an expert in a field? How does that make any sense?

It’s a broken system. I wish that I could tell you that this is something that will change in the future but I can’t. It would be awesome if it were different, but the reality is, it’s not. I’m sure that you’ve run into this problem as well and I know how disheartening it is to see. Don’t you dare give up though.

I’m going to slightly change the subject to avoid going further into a rant. I understand your pain and frustration. I was in your position not too long ago and, with what I’ve learned, I want to share what five years of experience teaches you.

I want to outline things that you can do to make yourself more desirable in the job market so that you have a chance of landing one of these positions while scooting past this experience rule.

Now, obviously, reading this book won’t give you five years of experience. I’m sorry. However, it will give you insight into what companies are looking for from you once you check that box. This book will give you ideas for how to reframe your resumé and portfolio to reflect more of the skills and attributes that companies want to see from more experienced individuals.

In the first part of this book I want to help you form a better understanding of what companies really see in a professional creative and what it takes in order to land that first job in the field. It seems like it should be a simple process: apply for a job that you’re qualified for and the company will hire the candidate with the best fit for the position. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, it actually isn’t that simple. From being in the corporate creative industry, I’ve learned that there are other elements at play when companies are hiring creatives especially when the person in-charge of the hiring doesn’t have a creative background themselves.

Having now worked with people who are in higher-level, non-creative positions, I’ve noticed some recurring themes in their thought processes. It’s something that I believe needs to be shared and understood by all creatives, but specifically those who are just now entering the workforce. In the first part of this book, I hope to help you learn how to frame yourself in order to land those jobs you’ve been looking at. Once you make it into the industry, the second part of this book will teach you how to stay in the industry.

When we’re young, thinking in future-tense is difficult. Not that you aren’t thinking about your future, I’m sure that you are, but we tend to think about our future measured by achieved goals and ambitions and not necessarily in terms of how we get to those goal posts. To keep yourself from going insane, there are some things you need to know about the long haul. The fast paced, high-stress lifestyle that you are used to in college isn’t sustainable in the real world. In order for you to survive and thrive in the industry, you have to understand what it means to be a career creative.

Now, I know you’re in a tough spot, but you will get through it. I can tell that you take your creative career seriously because you’ve at least gotten this far. I mean, you’re reading a book, hell yeah! That’s a huge step that a lot of potential creative professionals don’t get to. You’re taking all of the right steps and, soon enough, you’ll be amongst the ranks of the other professional creatives. It just takes time, patience and understanding to get there.

My Background

I figured that a good place to start would be to give you a quick runthrough of where I come from. I’ll keep this brief so we can get into the good stuff.

I began considering a creative career path mid-way through high school. The school I went to had / has a prolific Digital Media program where I learned how to use every program in the Adobe Creative Suite (CS4/CS5 at the time) and was introduced to various realms of graphic design, audio mixing, video production, photography editing, web design and a whole bunch more.

In college, I pursued a degree in industrial design with a focus in product design. This is where I learned about how to use the creative process in a business environment. I learned all about the product development cycle, how products are manufactured, and all of the necessary steps needed in order to get a product out of your brain and into your hand.

I came out of college with my head held high because I knew that I would land a job no problem.Needless to say, that’s not how that went.

I had applied for 50 or so positions and gotten one interview which turned into nothing. It was discouraging to say the least.

A couple of months after that, through a grapevine of connections, I started an internship with a venture capitalist who was working on a bunch of different companies. My education finally began to come full circle. All of the digital media knowledge that I had gained and my product design degree merged together to where I became a creative that focused on the lifecycle of product launches.

When my internship ended, I started a consultancy that advertised me as a general creative for hire. Yes, I was very young to do this and I didn’t have that much experience but I still wasn’t having any luck in the job market and those pesky student loan collectors started calling, so I had to do something to bring in some money.

For the next year and a half, I was able to sustain myself with my company, Departure Creative Lab. During this time I picked up a contract with my friend’s dad’s (Chuck Piccirillo) company, Zealic Solutions which is where I dove into the field of UI/UX (User Interface and User Experience). This led me into a full-time position as the company’s Lead UI/UX Designer.

My career hasn’t necessarily been a smooth and straight path but it got me to where I needed to be. It’s not exactly where I thought I would go but I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Needless to say, even though I’m still relatively new in the industry, I’ve learned a lot from my experiences. A bunch of it I wish I had learned before I dove into the job market, but it is what it is. However, now that I have that knowledge, I want to share what I’ve learned with you so it will hopefully lessen the culture shock for you when becoming a professional creative and maybe even help you land a job.

02:

What You’re Up Against

I remember the day after I graduated from college and started applying for jobs. I was really excited and definitely a little bit cocky as I perused the job listings. I had my portfolio and resumé ready to go and I had spent a lot of time making sure that they were just right.

I was so sure that my work would speak for itself. I was really proud of the projects that I presented in my portfolio and I was positive that companies would see the value in me. Due to my excitement and rose-colored glasses, I believed that I didn’t need to do anything else to stand out from the rest of the people applying for the same positions. I had a bold resumé and portfolio template that would grab peoples’ attention and I had a bunch of projects that ran the gamut of creativity and innovation (or so I thought at that moment). I thought: companies are looking for fresh blood and I’m as fresh as it gets. I’m fresh out of a good Industrial Design college who’s ready to work, what else could I need? The answer: a lot.

What I had at that moment was really just the