Posts tagged ‘career’
Choices, choices
by garlandcannon on flickr, CC applies
This job, this career, this industry – it’s all about making choices:
- choose to stay where you are and see what happens, or go for an interview when the recruiter phones
- choose to live in the sticks, with fresh air, affordable accommodation and family nearby or upsticks to London for better career prospects
- choose to be true to yourself or to toe the agency line
- choose keeping your head down or the open warfare of office politics
- choose ambition – but for success or balance (you probably can’t have both)
- choose recommending the right solution or the one that makes the agency most money
- chose staying late to been seen to do so or staying late when it matters
- choose to jump on every bandwagon or to beware the Emperor’s New Clothes
Choose living life to the full. You chose this career. But don’t let it make your choices for you.
Wanna be a Planner? Straight talking advice for graduates.
image courtsey of spell with flickr
I’ve be running into a lot of wannabe Planners recently and without wanting to sound too harsh, here are a few home truths you need to hear before you decide on Planning as a career path. Please take them in the spirit of kindly advice that they were meant!
1) Yes, the number of trained Planners currently exceeds the number of Planning jobs to be filled, BUT a) there is a recession on the way and Planners have always been a Luxury Item in agencies and b) the number of wannabe Planners vastly outnumbers the number of agencies currently prepared to take on graduates and train them up. So to be honest, your employment prospects are not great.
2) Reality check time. Junior Planners photocopy, get sent to the supermarket to buy ten different brands of tinned tomatoes and spend a lot of their time wading through 150 page Mintel reports and wrestling with TGI and TNS data on uncooperative excel spreadsheets. Life as a Junior Planner is probably even less fun than working as a Junior Account Handler – it’s not a fast track that bypasses photocopying and typing up contact reports.
3) Which brings me on to Skills. It would help vastly if you were numerate, a good communicator, a creative thinker and really interested in people and trends and stuff like that. A Media Studies degree does not necessarily demonstrate that to me.
4) So you need to start learning all over again. Read Truth, Lies, and Advertising
4) Learn how to be Interesting. Russell Davies has written tons about this. Start windsurfing or tap dancing or decide to visit every seaside pier still standing in Britain. Take a photo every day. Be interested in other people. Strike up conversations, eavesdrop in cafes, think about why people have arrived at certain opinions.
5) When you can demonstrate that you understand what Planners actually do, the skill set you will need and that you appreciate what you would need to learn in order to be effective in the role, THEN start approaching agencies asking about graduate Planning roles. I promise at least I will listen a lot more attentively.
update, 20/01/11 – I’ve just stumbled across a video I did to support the (new at the time) Diploma in Creative and Media for 14-19 year olds. There’s lots of tips for wannabe Planners on there (even if they seem to have called me an Account Manager for some reason), so it might be worth a look.
Did anyone reading this actually plan a career in Planning?
This week I’ve been roped into helping out a little bit more with the development of the new 14-19 Diploma in Creative & Media.
I was doing a ‘What do Planners and Researchers Do?’ vox pop as part of their new fangled t’interweb online study resource thingy and I hit a bit of a brick wall when I was asked what was the best way to get into a career in Planning.
To be honest, if you’re 14 and hell-bent on being a Planner, it should automatically disqualify you from the job. Whether new Planners arrive via an agency graduate scheme, Miami Ad School, a move across from Research or just sort of fall into it, they should have already had a bit of an Interesting life.
I’m not talking about only considering potential planners who are over 30, just that they should have done something (anything!) apart from education with their life first. A desire to enter Planning founded in your teens is hardly going to encourage the kind of life experiences that make you more insightful Planner. Its also not going to result in the lightbulb moment in your mid 20s when you realise that there’s this career out there that suits your skill set, the way your brain works AND could be a lot of fun.
Any aspiring Planners out there – go write a book, start a movement, launch a business or dip your toe in an entirely different career. You’ll either realise that there’s thousands of other cool jobs out there (and considering how few entry-level Planning jobs there are, that can only be A Good Thing), or come back a better Planner-to-be.
photo by Russell ‘Interesting’ Davies, creative commons applies
