“You can choose to be intimidated by change or excited by it”

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:

Design has changed so much and I don’t even know Figma or any other modern tools and workflows I see people using, and so I wonder if my experience is still valuable and if I should be opening up to learning these new things.

I've been working for several years and I find my work is largely templated and the same as what I started doing when I was hired. I make lyric videos and other supplemental designs like gifs and social assets to support clients, but by and large don’t do anything original. I know the job market is tough but is this experience enough if I want to advance anywhere in my career?

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

It does feel like technology is moving at a rate of knots and the industry is running to keep up. Historically, those willing to embrace new tech stay ahead. From the first computer, to Flash, to web design, and now AI. The people using new software aren’t instant experts in it, they’re just open minded to adapting their creative practice.

You can choose to be intimidated by change or excited by it. Gone are the days of Adobe having a monopoly on the industry; it’s an even playing field as creatives make the tools they want to use themselves. Some of those bug bears you have with your current setup don’t exist in newer programmes like Figma. If you’re worried switching will slow you down, that will likely be offset by cool new features designed to speed you up.

If you want to advance in your career, then you need to keep growing. Relying on templates or a cookie cutter approach is going to keep you treading water. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re satisfied and earning a living, but you can’t expect to move up without keeping up. And I hate to say it, but if your work can be templated, then it’s more at risk of being replicated by AI.

All that being said, you cannot learn every new programme or new software that comes out. Assigning yourself an R&D day each month can be an easy way to break out of the monotony. Challenge yourself to create something just for the fun of it. Try to think of it like a test drive. Dabble in a program and see how it feels. There’s a lot more crossover than you think, so it shouldn’t be as hard as you imagine (except untraining the muscle memory of certain shortcuts!)

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.

If You Could is the jobs board from It’s Nice That, the place to find jobs in the creative industries.

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