“Engineering and creativity are not mutually exclusive”

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: 

“Do you have any advice for someone transitioning from a technical background into a creative role?

I’m currently working as an engineer, but I’m looking to transition into the creative field. Do you have any advice for someone making this kind of shift? Have you ever seen or worked with people from an engineering background in your line of work, and how they managed to adapt to the creative environment?”

Kat Wong, founder of career change platform Oh Yeah:

It’s a move I’ve seen a few times (and successfully done), but it’s often pre-empted by an initial sense of ‘am I creative enough?’ Engineering and creativity are not mutually exclusive. In fact, collaborations between the two are essential in so many industries. And more so in my last organisation, which wove both disciplines to deliver real innovation across technology and design on a global scale. As an engineer, your baseline experience is being a creative problem-solver, albeit through a more technical lens. And the joy you can bring for yourself, and others, is sharing different, innovative solutions that other ‘creative’ sectors may not have thought of. 

And that’s where you can start when it comes to adapting to a more unfamiliar environment. You’ve not shared your current type of organisation, or what creative role you’d like to pursue. But as a first step, does your workplace have a more ‘creative’ department where you can gain a better understanding – a UX or product design team? Asking to shadow, even for a short period, where you can learn through observation can give you a much more rounded sense of what’s needed, but more importantly, what resonates with you. You may find there are more similarities than you think. From there, can you offer a more integrated approach to help tackle a particular ‘creative’ initiative or challenge, reframing through your engineering lens. A good company will always be open to broader perspectives across disciplines for certain projects, so start offering and make sure that’s visible to other ‘creative’ teams.  

If the internal route isn’t viable, then start doing short, low-commitment experiments that can whet your appetite to give you more data on a potential transition. Are there a couple of folks you know in your interested field where you grab 30 mins (be specific in what you’d like to know and learn), or is there a creative organisation which is looking for advisory support or volunteering where you can gain knowledge and experience in their environment? This will give you more visibility in what’s needed – for example, creative storytelling or more cross-functional partnerships. What you may find is that engineering is still your core passion, but you’d like to evolve how your skills are used and what working culture you’d prefer. This could be more involvement with designers, or more ‘front-facing’ products or programmes. Either way, enjoy experimenting and playing around with what resonates with you (and what doesn’t!) as you build on your professional growth and path.

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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