Where are you going?
The time will come when you will finally be settled into your job and able to take the focus on learning how to survive in the agency. Now you can switch the focus to yourself and see exactly where you are going. Knowing where you are going is essential if you want to get somewhere. If you do not have a direction, then you end up just wandering around aimlessly. You may think that advertising is enough of a direction. But that is only your profession. Now you have to decide where you are going to go in the profession of advertising.
There are a lot of choices available to you. You could stay at the first agency you get a job with for the rest of your life and move up to positions of great responsibility. Or you could leave your first agency after a few years and get a higher level position at a bigger or more prestigious agency. You could even set your sights on getting as much experience as possible in an agency, or several agencies, and then opening an agency of your own. Or you could work for agencies as a freelancer. And another option is to leave agency work altogether and work in a corporate or nonprofit environment. You could also get out of the doing of advertising and go into the teaching of advertising.
This chapter will present the pros and cons of each of these options. It will also help you evaluate your own desires for your future, from a career perspective as well as a personal perspective. Then once you know where you want to go, you will learn how to develop an action plan that will get you there. Finally, you will find out why it is important to have a goal, but why it can be dangerous to fall in love with it.
Moving up, not out
If you are able to keep your job in the first agency that hires you for at least a year, you can begin thinking about moving up. Moving up may mean simply taking on more responsibility for-hopefully-more money, but not necessarily getting a new job tide or a new job description. For example, if you were originally hired as a graphic designer, after a while you may be asked to expand your duties and do less designing and more supervising of the newer fledgling designers.
But the time may come when taking on more responsibility is not enough for you. You may want to move up into a higher position-a promotion with another job title and a higher salary. That opportunity might come to you strictly by chance, or you could begin laying the groundwork for that to happen within the first several months of employment with your new agency.
You certainly do not want to walk into an agency on the first day of work and already be thinking about a promotion. That could be a bit premature. But after a few months you should begin to sense whether or not this place feels comfortable to you. Do you like the people you are working with? Does the agency appear to be on solid ground financially? If so, then you may want to start thinking about carving out a future with this agency. How do you do that? By closely observing the people you work with. How many of the employees have been with the agency for at least five years? How many of them have been there longer? As you get to know your fellow workers better, you begin to get a real sense of just how happy they are in their positions at the agency. Keep your mind open as you learn what they like at the agency and what they do not. You may feel very positive about the agency for the first year and then, little by little, begin to see things that are not to your liking. After two or more years there you could begin to form a very different opinion about your desire for a long-term stay with the agency. The veterans of over five years will be your best guide about the true nature of the agency's wear ability.
What determines this wear ability? Probably the most important thing is how the owners treat the employees. Are they fair in their expectations? Are they generous financially in providing regular salary increases? How do they handle interoffice squabbles, disciplinary measures, and employee disputes? Do the employees feel appreciated when they pitch in and go that extra mile to help out? Do they feel like individuals who have valuable skills, talents, or abilities to contribute to the agency, or do they feel like hired help? Have the long-term employees stayed with the agency because they feel like it is a wonderful place to work and they want to be there? Or do they stay because they are scared they will have a hard time finding a comparable job elsewhere?
As for yourself, even if the agency does pass your many litmus tests of employee satisfaction and longevity, can you see an open track along which your career can continue to move and expand? If the agency is small, can you see a place within the agency's structure that would allow you to move up into not just one position of greater responsibility but several over many years or even a lifetime of advancement?
For example, suppose you were hired as an account coordinator to take care of the many details of client accounts. This is a nice entry level position that could keep you happily productive for a year or two. But where else could you move up within the agency after that? If the next position that you would like to move up to is an account supervisor, and the agency vice president, who is also one of the owners, is acting as the account supervisor, would that person have to leave before you could have an account supervisor's position? What are the chances that an owner would leave the agency? Practically nil! Are the owners interested in allowing the agency to grow enough to support another account supervisor? If not, and some small agencies are perfectly content to maintain a fixed number of accounts and employees, you may be stuck in a dead-end job. These are the questions you will need to consider about your agency.
