“You know how to sell, or defend, creative to a team that isn’t well versed in its importance”

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 used to work freelance for various brand agencies. I did this for about seven years and enjoyed it very much. A change in circumstance meant I took up the offer of a permanent in-house role which I’ve been doing for seven years. I’d like to move back to agency work. Is that possible after working in-house?

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

The short answer is absolutely. In-house experience is just as valid as agency experience. You can bounce between the two. It gives you such a broad understanding of why we do what we do and can act as a huge asset in an agency.

There is still a little stigma around being in-house, but let me tell you, anyone who thinks that isn’t looking at what’s happening in our industry right now. In-house teams are killing it. Brilliant creatives are being poached and creating amazing campaigns, or heading up huge rebrands. We recently covered this on The NDA Podcast, with the amazing Emma Sexton (founder of Inside Out) and Kieran Mistry (head of design at YouTube) so I’d recommend listening to that episode, as they’ve seen firsthand how powerful in-house experience can be.

So why does it make you an asset? Once you’ve been client-side, you understand the challenges of upper management. You know what an in-house team actually needs to use a brand identity (spoiler: it’s not guidelines with more mockups than rules, or a ton of whizzy 3D renders). You know how to sell, or defend, creative to a team that isn’t well versed in its importance. These are all skills studios have to employ every day, often without the insider knowledge.

It also makes you very commercially aware. We rarely talk about the fact that our work should have an impact on our client’s success. Ultimately we’re trying to make them more money. By being on the inside, you’ll understand that more than most. Creative work needs to perform, it needs to hit certain engagement levels and generate X amount of income for the business. Performance is not a dirty word, it’s something I think most creatives need to be more aware of.

Finally, practices that in-house teams often employ (like great team camaraderie or work/life balance) is something the industry can do better. While it might be a change of pace to begin with, there’s nothing saying that you need to be the one to adjust. It could be an opportunity to educate a studio on how to create a better environment.

Let us know where you end up. Good luck.

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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