“Evolving your career into a position of influence is a natural next step”

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’m a designer in advertising and I’m in a mid-level position. I now want to move from making things look good to now defining how the piece of work should be from a creative direction standpoint. My current comfort zone is execution and delivering. However, I want to become a designer that is more conceptual and can influence strategy conversations.

How do I move from execution to creative direction? How do I start leading concepts, not just visuals? And how do I built a career that shapes and leads projects rather than just thinking about design deliverables?”

Kat Wong, founder of career change platform Oh Yeah:

Well, it’s super clear that you’re hungry for it, and with good reason. You’ve already identified that you’re in your comfort zone. Or playing the C-major chord for a while, as I’d like to put it. Evolving your career into a position of influence, strategically, is a natural next step for many across any industry.

As you’ve not shared this, I’d love to know: does your manager know of your ambition yet? If you have been sharing your goals with them, but not felt supported, this requires a completely different response – and it also depends on how supportive the agency is in developing staff and emerging leaders. But as neither has been mentioned, let’s assume this clarity of ambition has not officially been tabled.

So, here are some tactics. Firstly, ahead of your next 1:1 with your manager, be upfront that you’d like to start discussing your future development, where you’re ready to lean into more strategic conversations. Then, before you have this chat, do a bit of homework. Identify what actionable steps can help you gain more experience and visibility whilst being supported in this area.

A couple of examples: Do you need more exposure to the decision-making process to gain further context and strategic understanding? If so, identify a couple of collaborative meetings where it is possible for you to attend.

Secondly, are there a couple of projects in the pipeline where you could be given more strategic responsibility as a trial out, but supported at the same time?

And then in your 1:1 with your manager, you can have these ideas on hand which can become actionable steps. Together, and over time, it’s agreeing a plan of action to help you with your growth and development in order to get you more experience in shaping projects. Be honest when you’re having these discussions on how you’d like to progress and how ready you are to contribute more to the company.

There’s no magic bullet, but good old consistency to build up your experience and shared trust to take on more strategic responsibility. Not only does it help to sharpen the quality of your decision-making and critical thinking, but it also helps your reputation and visibility, therefore putting you in a better position to lead future projects when the opportunity arises.

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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