A jack of all trades and a master of one

- Given their size and mandate to be efficient and cost-effective, most in-house creative teams are flattered than their agency and design firm counterparts. This means less specialization and more responsibility, accountability, and potential opportunity for you. It's a double-edged sword that if you wield correctly, will deliver job satisfaction and accelerated career growth. It might even be more engaging, and dare I say, fun. "How can this be?", you may ask. If I'm being asked to do more, and that more is outside of my training and area of expertise, aren't I being exploited and set up to fail? Apply a Jedi mind-trick here and you may find that the seemingly career-challenging situation can be flipped to your advantage. Look, I get that you didn't become a designer, copywriter, video editor, whatever, so you can manage clients, projects, and external vendors. But if you applied the same creativity and expertise you employ when practicing your discipline, you can get pretty good at these other skills and even enjoy them, as long as they don't become the majority of your role and responsibilities. They may also provide you with more opportunities to influence your clients and managers and achieve greater creative control. And what right-brain, obsessive-compulsive creative wouldn't want that! There are primarily four areas your can grow into. One, expanding and enhancing your skills within your current discipline. Two, new functional expertise. For example, if you're a photographer, you may want to learn videography. Three, operations and project management. And four, leadership. Clearly, expanding on your current skills is the most obvious career path. This involves through both work experience and possibly engaging in formal professional development. Honing and enhancing your craft. The opportunities for moving into higher positions first show up as growing from a junior-level position into a mid-level, and then a senior role at your company, with an accompanying title and compensation change. The next step in climbing the career ladder within your current discipline is a bit more challenging. Often, after achieving a senior position in your function, you're faced with a difficult choice of whether to move out of a hands-on role to a management position with very different responsibilities than your current functional role entails. Now this may work for you if you have the necessary interpersonal communication and leadership skills and mindset. Plus, and this is a big deal, the passion and desire to be a manager and leader. Then by all means, you should take the leap. Just make sure your organization is committed to setting you up for success by providing training to fill knowledge and skills gaps that you'll need as a manager. If management isn't really your cup of tea, there's a different path that many organizations are starting to provide their employees. It offers individuals who possess mastery in a particular discipline, the opportunity to move into higher level positions often called, Subject Matter Expert, or SME. Think of moving into this role as you become a functional guru. In this position, you support your team members as a mentor, by providing real-time advice, as well as more formal coaching and training by way of events such as lunch-and-learns and workshops. Often SMEs are also tasked with keeping abreast of industry developments and looking for ways to apply them to studio projects. Meeting with clients to provide technical advice and guidance. Taking on the more demanding jobs coming into the studio. SMEs rarely have direct reports and therefore dodge the management bullet, which allows them to stay focused on their chosen discipline. If your organization doesn't have a SME role, ratchet up your courage and propose one. You never know, you can start a whole SME revolution at your company. Broadening your skills into other disciplines is the second most obvious way to increase your value in your industry and to your organization. What in-house lead wouldn't rather hire a team member who can take on multiple tasks within a project or multiple projects in different disciplines. For one, this allows projects to be executed with fewer project team members, thus increasing efficiency. In addition, it gives the lead the opportunity to keep you better utilized by being able to move you from one discipline to another as the work coming into the group dictates. In other words, if you can work both in InDesign and PowerPoint, and the InDesign work slows down as the PowerPoint work is picking up, you're lead can easily and quickly transition you to the PowerPoint projects. I'll cover operations and project management later on, but let's just say for now, that you're most likely, already engaged in this discipline to some degree. So why not embrace it and get good at it? No downside to that! Finally, I want to touch on leadership as a career path and vocation. As I noted previously, leadership or management is a potential career path for you if you have the potential to develop appropriate skills and possess a desire for this expansion of your skills and associated value. It's not easy. I can attest to that from personal experience. But it can be very rewarding. The key is to understand and embrace that this means applying your creativity to your job in a different way. Instead of fashioning creative deliverables, you become a designer of teams, processes and procedures. Your canvas or blank page is the more abstract world of relationships, organizational structures, team culture, and operational infrastructure. It can be very rewarding to operate at this level, in spite of the sacrifice of giving up the hands-on, creative responsibilities that you had. And there has never been a time when there is a greater need for creatives to move up into leadership positions than now. The path to leadership requires that you proactively create opportunities for yourself. The clearest approach is for you to let your manager know of your aspirations, and partner with your manager on ways to take on informal leadership roles within the team. This could include taking on a specific area of operational expertise or management, such as becoming the team's brand or compliance steward. Partnering with a project manager to become a project-specific creative team lead is another option. A third opportunity is to become your functional team lead's backup, so that when he or she is unavailable, you become the team's point of contact for both internal issues as well as with clients. In conjunction with securing on-the-job leadership experience, I can't stress enough, the need for you to educate yourself on leadership best practices. There are dozens of books, periodicals, blogs, online content, workshops, and courses on the topic. I also recommend you find an experienced leader to support you as a mentor. Because there are fewer leadership roles in teams than individual contributor positions, moving into a formal leadership job may mean having to leave your group for an opportunity at another company. Even if this is your next best step, acquiring the leadership experience and training I just described, is necessary for you to even be considered for a new job at another organization. I hope it's clear to you that your options for enhancing your value at your current job, accelerating your professional growth, and expanding your career opportunities are broad and deep. The key is to determine what path best fits your strengths and passions.