“Be super upfront about what you want – and passionate about why”

Creative Career Conundrums is a weekly advice column from If You Could Jobs. Each week their selected panel of professionals from the creative industry answers your burning career questions to help you navigate the creative journey.

This week’s question:

“I started my career at a non-profit youth orchestra where I discovered my love of graphic design. Now I work in corporate in-house for an IT company as the sole marketing person. My manager is an EVP (Executive Vice President) and wants to retire soon, so he asks about my career goals with the intention of making me a manager or director.

If I do that, I immediately lose the design path and become admin/marketing, while a young designer gets to come in and do what I love doing. The reason I’m pushing back is because I’m not a people manager and want to remain a designer. I wonder if I should find a different place to land or if that will be difficult given my age (is everyone over 40 expected to climb the ladder?) I’m a senior graphic designer and that’s the career path I want to stay on. I appreciate the help and advice!

How do I find companies that value this choice and my experience?”

Katie Cadwell, co-founder of branding studio Lucky Dip and The NDA Podcast:

It’s brilliant that you know exactly what you want (and don’t want). There has to be space in this industry for people who’d rather stay on the tools. Firstly, because there aren’t enough managerial roles for everyone. And secondly, because we don’t want to lose all that wisdom and insight from our creative teams. We need it on the studio floor, not sitting around the boardroom table.

If you know the role isn’t for you, then you can absolutely change jobs. Your age shouldn’t be a factor (or certainly not a negative one). We are living in an aging population, and as a consequence our creative teams should be getting older. There will come a time soon when we need life experience more than ever to offset the surface level references AI gives us.

If your CV landed in my inbox, I’d think “Great, a designer who’s passionate enough about their craft to want to do it forever”. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to progress into management; it’s an entirely different job, and creative leaders know that. Hopefully they’ll be relieved to have a candidate who isn’t angling for a promotion, so they can focus on making the perfect role for you to grow into.

So to start with, you need to shake off that feeling that it’s a negative. Get rid of that internal ageism you’re carrying. I love this quote from Cindy Gallop: “Your age is a very special number because it’s the sum total of you. It’s the representation of all your life experience, learnings, and things that make you uniquely you over the years. Your age is a crucial dimension of what makes you valuable.”

There’s no directory of workplaces that value experience, so I can’t point you to them. But find the creative leaders on LinkedIn having conversations about ageism. Look through team pages to gauge the average age of the headshots. Then when it comes to interviewing, be super upfront about what you want – and passionate about why. How that makes you a brilliant asset. And if they don’t see that, move on, it’s their loss.

I hope you find the right place to thrive for another few decades.

In answering your creative career conundrums we realise that some issues need expert support, so we’ve collated a list of additional resources that can support you across things that might arise at work.

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