So you’re graduating from a design course this summer? Well done you. Also, welcome to the madness.
It’s been a quietly devastating recession and most of my very talented and employable friends are struggling to find work. All the non profits I work with have have suffered from months of funding rejections and unresponsive funders. But maybe this week’s elections will help. In the meantime you’re going to have to adapt to the conditions and fast. Here are some tips from my own life (so your mileage may vary):
1. Have a job while you look for a job. Take a job in retail (I worked in malls, as a paralegal and in an HMV) while you’re looking for work. It’ll help take the pressure off and get you to be a little less stressed about making ends meet. And if you keep your income below £24,990 you don’t have to worry about repaying your student loan just yet which helps.
2. Expect it’ll take you six months to find something and it won’t be the perfect job. Jack used to say ‘you get the work you do’ so focus on finding an opportunity to do some of the work you want to do in your first 5 years which might turn into doing mostly that work and eventually only that work. But that can take 20 years. I’m 18 years in and I’m still at the ‘mostly’ stage.
3. Don’t sell your skills, sell yourself. I’ve been reviewing CVs of random people and I keep telling them to include something about themselves. Skills are cheap these days and you can find freelancers or generative AI to do a lot of menial design work so you have to sell yourself, your approach, your personality over your skills. Start a blog, start vlogging about the things you’re passionate about, make some noise! If that feels too difficult, you’re going to struggle in design, one of the most personality driven industries around (architecture and fashion are at the top of the list).
4. Practice public speaking. I started giving talks at conferences a year after I graduated and eventually secured a speaking agent. If you’re too shy to talk about your work to strangers, how are you going to convince anyone that you are ready to talk to a potential client about difficult design decisions that aren’t going to make them happy? Sign up to a meetup you like and ask the organisers to give a talk. It’s wonderful practice to speak to a room of people who didn’t study with you and have never met you. Get good at presenting and persuading strangers because it’s a skill no computer can replace.
5. Don’t send a pdf, have a website. If you want to be taken seriously as a designer, you should be able to maintain your own little part of the internet. I was bullied into starting a website by Tristam Sparks and a blog by a professor (ht Yaniv Steiner) when I was a student. I started using Twitter for work in 2011. All these things add up, like leaving bread crumbs so that someone has ways of finding out about your work accidentally.
6. Think about your social media accounts. Lock down all your private social media accounts if you can. Your future employers (or their HR departments) will look you up.
7. Introduce yourself. If you are adding people on Linkedin, introduce yourself. If you find someone’s work interesting, ask them to go for coffee. If someone is advertising a new job, ask them for a 15 minute call to find out more. All this is excellent practice for what real life feels like when you graduate: a sea of strangers. You need to introduce yourself to new people all the time after you leave the warm cocoon of academia. And the trick is to get really good at it, and not spend too much time behind a computer.
8. Keep going. A joke amongst my friends is that people start blogging again when they’re looking for work. Never stop even once you’ve found your first job. It’s a long game of snakes and ladders you’re playing so you want to make sure you are constantly creating your next opportunity. You won’t have the same sense of urgency, but don’t be that person with a blog post every three years. Keep it up, keep going, and people will notice.
Good luck.