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The Brand Design Masters Podcast with Philip VanDusen is dedicated to helping you build the skills you need to design bullet-proof brands - for yourself, your business and for the clients and customers you serve.
In every episode, Philip, his co-hosts and interview guests will share inspiration, ideas, trends and techniques that will lift you to greater heights as a creative professional or entrepreneur - so you can build a successful creative practice, business and personal brand in the Creative Economy.
7 Ways to Future-Proof Your Career
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Hey everybody! Okay let's talk about how to future proof yourself.
Everyone has pivots in their life, in their professional lives. If you think that you are going to start your career doing one thing, and you are going to keep doing that thing all the way through it, nothing's ever going to change. You're going to get that perfect job. You're going to work your way to the top of the ladder.
You're going to stay there. Let me tell you, as a creative professional, And someone who's been around this industry for 30 years, that ain't going to happen. So I'm going to tell you right now, being prepared for pivoting is really important. And the things I'm going to talk to you about today, about future proofing your career, some are tactical, some are mindset, some are practice.
But they are methods to make sure that you come out of this path. Out of this journey smelling like a rose because it's going to be jumpy. There's going to be side jogs in there. There's going to be things that are thrown in your way that are not expected. I can tell you from experience that happens.
I'm going to tell you just a little bit about my story. I've had a lot of career pivots in my life. I started off as a painter. I got my master's in painting, so I'm actually a fine artist and I became a teacher of the fine arts and I've been laid off or fired. seven times in my career. I have moved from one state to another four work, four times in my career.
I've had fourteen jobs since I got out of college. I've had seven major career pivots in my life. I went from artist to a teacher. I went from teacher to being an apparel designer, a t shirt designer. I moved from being a t shirt designer to be a design manager, a creative director, manager of people. I moved over to a designer.
A global apparel company, giant corporation, to be a vice president of design overseeing 65 people across five divisions outside of design, into packaging, into textile design, into color, into trend. Some of you may wonder where I got my trend experience, that's where I got it, in the apparel industry.
And then, I pivoted over to be an executive creative director in a global packaging firm, doing branding, brand strategy, and lots of packaging. And then I went from the agency side back to the client side in a fast moving consumer products company, one of the big soda manufacturers in the world, one of the two biggest, overseeing salty snacks, right?
Global job creative leader, but on the client side. And then when I left that I started my own accessories company. So I became an entrepreneur. I started a e commerce. I ran that for about a year and then I pivoted again and started my own agency and my own consultancy. I've had over seven major shifts and jogs and pathway changes in my career.
And I can guarantee you, I know a lot of creative professionals at a lot of different levels. And this is the way that it goes. Things get put in your way that you are not expecting.
Alright, let's talk a little bit about threats. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Let's talk about the threats first. AI design.
There are computers doing graphic design completely independently of people now, and that is going to do nothing but get better . When design programs became computerized, it was very, stone age, right?
It was. Microsoft paint. It was Apple paint, it was bad. It was pixelated. It was clunky, but now look at it. And that is what's going to happen with artificial intelligence and design.
And there's other massive changes going on. The agency world has shifted dramatically. So large global Microsoft Mechanics www. microsoft. com www. microsoft. com Branding agencies, the WPPs, the Omnicoms, the holding companies, they are experiencing tectonic shifts in how their businesses run. And there are large companies, large clients, going to smaller and smaller agencies because they need speed, they need flexibility, they need lower cost.
And so lower cost agencies, flexible model agencies, partnership model agencies are doing very well and getting very big clients because Who large companies are going to is changing. There's also been this explosion of, the era of the independent contractor.
They're saying that within the next few years, over 45 percent of workers in the creative professions will be independent contractors. And so that's a statistic you can't turn your back on either, right? That's an important one. There's the global creative economy, the downward pricing pressure of fiber and 99 designs, etc.
That's a major threat to creative professionals as well. There's the end of job security, right? Companies used to be loyal. Agencies used to be somewhat loyal. Agencies have never been completely loyal, but that is over, right?
Agencies lose a client they shed people. Companies lose a market, they get acquired, they get reorganized. They shed people. So job security isn't what it used to be. COVID has obviously changed the landscape dramatically everywhere. There's the, economic downturns, the the real estate crisis, the dot com crisis, those things come out of nowhere too and throw huge loads of bricks in people's pathways of their career.
And the other major threat is in that I am guilty of this one, and maybe you are too, but It's very easy if you work for a particular agency or company for a period of time or you work at a particular level for a period of time that you start to identify and attach your personal identity. To the company or the agency that you work for, or the kind of work that you're doing for that company, or to your job title, or to your salary level, that agency name, that company name, that is also a threat is to get too attached or start to identify who you are with that.
too closely, because those things can get shifted, they can get wrenched apart, and then you are like having to figure stuff out, right? That's the heavy, right? Sorry about the whole heavy thing, but that is the heavy, and that is the truth, in a lot of ways.
Let's talk about opportunities now,?
The landscape is just insane and how much opportunity there is out there, not just for creatives in this Exploding creative economy, but in terms of what we have at our disposal To do what we do, right? So there's free education everywhere YouTube is second biggest search engine in the world.
You can learn anything in the world on YouTube for free. There are free voice platforms. So a place where you have a voice, a soapbox where you can express your opinion. Dozens and dozens of them, social platforms. There are free design platforms, places where you can showcase your work for free to the world, to global audiences.
You have access to experts and mentors through Webinars, or through mini courses, or through, free conferences that, that go on all the time. Incredible access to top level people that we never used to have before. Super cheap design platforms.
If you can't afford the Adobe Creative Suite, which is a lot of money, There are free platforms that do vector design and photography editing and all sorts of things, video editing copywriting improvement all sorts of things. Our reach as creative professionals can be amplified. It has expanded exponentially now, much more so than it used to.
It has leveled the playing field between the people who have like tons of money, or giant corporations who have gigantic marketing budgets. It has leveled the playing field between us, individual contributors, and The biggies, right? Huge opportunities. What if your plans, best laid plans are mice and men, right?
What if your plans, plan A, plan B, plan C, what if they fail? What are you going to do? What if there's a global downturn? What if you get laid off by your agency or your company? Your company gets acquired and you're on the street. You have to actively invest time and energy in future proofing yourself.
And I'm going to get into seven ways that you can future proof yourself.
But there are some basics that you have to have. Yes, you have to have a basic creative expertise. You're a graphic designer, you're a copywriter, you're a photographer, you're an illustrator. Your base expertise, that is a given.
Okay, you gotta get that, you gotta maintain that, you have to establish your capability within a base level. But you also have to be open and keep your eyes open and your attention piqued to constantly learning. Developing new communication skills, writing skills, developing sales skills, etc.
Number one.
Don't focus on yourself.
Focus on the problems that you are solving for people.
Don't focus on your job description. Don't focus on your particular title, your skill set. What you need to focus on and develop is empathy.
Empathy and understanding and the ability to listen. The ability to listen to your clients. The ability to listen to their customers. The ability to listen to your colleagues. Learn to understand problems. Learn to be able to hear them because it's not about you. It's about the problems that you can solve.
The more you become in tuned with problem solving as a motivation, the more You will be able to address any situation you are faced with. One of the biggest mistakes that I see creative professionals doing on their websites, now listen up to this. If you guys have a website, and I hope you do, I want you to look at the copy on your website.
And if you go on the copy on your website, and there's a lot of stuff on the first page above the fold that says, starts with I, That's wrong. You got to talk about who it is you're talking to. What is their problem? Get them, voice what their problem is. Who are they? Are they a client with a branding problem?
Are they a client with a video problem? Are they a client with a marketing problem? Who are you talking to? What is the problem that you're solving? So many creatives, so many designers, I go to their websites and it's Hi, I'm Blah, and I am a graphic designer for the last 10 years and I , specialize in branded identity and I, do great packaging and I have all these skills in social media and I, no one wants to hear about you.
People who go to your website, they want to hear about their problem and how you can solve it. So you have to start with stating their problem. And I'm saying all this because. If you develop those problems listening skills to identify and empathize with people's problems, you will learn how to communicate in a problem solution way, starting with the problem and going to the solution rather than starting with the solution and then trying to look for people with the problem.
Number two.
Build research skills.
I think that the ability to do customer research and competitive research is one of those skills that is so transportable and so incredibly important to creative professionals and working with their clients that I wanted to put it up here as one of the top seven, because being able to do research will lead to new business.
Presenting research and facts to people about their consumers, about their competition will change people's minds. It will evolve how people are thinking about things. Learning how to develop insights, learning how to recognize trends, how to recognize trends in design, in business, in societal norms, in psychology.
Building customer avatars, building customer target profiles, doing user research. User research can be as simple as, a Google form or a Jot form, a questionnaire. That is Quantitative research, so based on responses that are numerical. And then there's also qualitative research, where you're doing consumer or user interviews, where you're finding the motivations and need states that people have.
Doing competitive audits. Learning how to compare your client's competition to each other and to your client. Research skills of this nature, consumer insight research skills, competitive audit research skills, trend skills, insight skills, and then also how you present those findings to people, how that is packaged in a presentation to communicate what you have learned to people. Those sorts of skills are incredibly transferable from one job description to another. And if you develop some basic research skills, it's going to help you in your creative freelance role right now. It's also going to help you way down the road when you start to have to take some side jogs in the web of your career as you have to pivot in one way or another.
Understanding motivation, right? So that empathy and also how to dig in and do research around customers and competition and markets is a skill that will serve you. And it's one that's based in gathering information. And filtering that information and coming to conclusions around that information.
Those sorts of skill sets will really serve you in the future.
Number three.
Embrace learning as a constant.
You have to be a lifelong learner. It is very easy to say, it's a lot harder to do. It is very easy to get stuck into a thought process, a pattern, a groove, something that's working for you and not continually question why or question what else could I explore.
If you heard the interview that I did with Chris Do on the Futur's podcast, I talked a lot about how I think that the biggest question that they ask you, When you're in school and deciding on a career is what is your what's your passion? What are you passionate about?
I think following your passion is probably responsible for more people being disappointed and disillusioned in their lives. than anything else and confused as a recent graduate because passion carries way too much emotional weight. There's too much pressure in passion, right? And especially when you're just starting off, it's very hard to figure out what you're passionate about.
You're still exploring. So I believe that everyone should nurture curiosity. Nurture curiosity through your entire life and explore things that you are curious about. That will lead you into areas you never thought possible. For instance, when I was a fine artist, I got a job teaching in France.
I went to France. I did a whole lot of monotypes, printmaking, right? I came back to the United States and I was just like, I gotta get a job, move to New York. And I thought these are really great prints that I made. I just I want to do something with them. So I started printing them on t shirts and selling them.
I was curious about the t shirt market. I was curious about how I could monetize this fine artwork that I had done. And that curiosity, and that exploration, and that tiptoeing into something new opened up an entirely new pathway of my career. And you never know where those little kernels of curiosity are going to take you into a new thing.
Okay learning as a skill set, I'm going to circle back on this in one of the top seven future proofing methods, but building skill sets in finance and writing and communication or project management, things that are beyond just the creative is also part of that learning as a constant, pushing the boundaries of what it is that you do.
Learning new applications. If you just know the Adobe Creative Suite, how about Keynote? How about video editing? How about Adobe Audition? How about audio editing? I'll tell you one application, and if you learn this application, it will serve you more in your career, in your professional career, than probably the Adobe Creative Suite, if you learn how to use it.
And that is Excel. And I hate to tell you this, but it's true. One of the things that unlocked my ability to manage people and to move into upper levels of executive work was learning Excel. And if you don't know how to use it, get in there and play around. And I know that's almost heresy. Talking to creatives about learning Excel, but it's true. It's true. I got to tell you one really quick story. I, as you might know, I was a VP at old Navy for a long period of time.
And Gap Inc, own Banana Republic, they own Athleta they own, Piper Lime, the shoe company, they own Old Navy huge multinational corporation. That whole corporation, their entire merchandising, their entire global production chain was like run on Excel.
You would think that a company of that scope would have some incredible, massive database. Thing that was like, all encompassing and was a product lifestyle, kind of machine that ran that whole company ran on Excel emailed Excel documents that were sent around the world.
Fun fact. All right. Here's a big one.
Number four.
Build an island empire.
What I mean by that is that you have to think about yourself as an island to an extent. You have to really own your own island. You got to think Like Britain,, you want to spread your influence around the world, but you want to have a safe place where you own your own land, you want to develop a body of work that shows your knowledge and your skills.
And you want to make sure that you do it in a place that you control. Now, you don't control the whole internet, but you do control your website. You want to own your own land, so you got to own your own website. And that's a website that's a holding place for your creative work, for your content work, for whatever kind of media work that you do, and that you don't rely on an external place, like YouTube, or like Instagram, or anywhere else, to be the holding unit for your work.
Yes, you can duplicate it out there, but I wanted to make sure that you are Owning your own work and your own land. Now, you also want to own your audience. And, for instance, YouTube. Here's the thing. I've got over 200, 000 followers on YouTube and I have maybe 5, 000 of their email addresses.
That's because YouTube doesn't let me see your email addresses. It won't give them to me. I can't communicate with you unless I am on YouTube. And that's why I encourage everybody who follows me on YouTube to go to my website philipvandusen. com and sign up for my email list, because then I can communicate with you directly.
And I value and nurture true relationships with the people. Who consume my content and who whose problems I try to solve.
Number five.
Own your audience.
So start developing an email list and drive people off whatever platforms you're on.
Twitter. YouTube, Facebook, drive them to your website, get their email address so you can communicate with them directly. You want to own your own land, you want to get them on your island, okay? And then, you want to start creating intellectual property. Intellectual property can be your design work, it can be your photography, it can be video, it can be audio, it can be your writing, it could be PDFs, it could be books, it can be tools, it can be checklists, it can be any number of digital or, maybe physical, maybe you own, own or sell physical products too.
You want to maintain those on your island as well because platforms go poof. Platforms change their billing structure. Platforms get acquired by somebody. They go belly up. You never know what's going to happen, so you want to make sure that you are building and maintaining your own island. I think I've made my point on that one.
Number Six
Develop your plus one.
What I mean by this, is like I said at the beginning, when you have to have the basics. We all have, as creative pros entrepreneurs, our basics We're a photographer, we're an illustrator, we're a graphic designer.
We have to develop a plu at least. A plus one. And we have to think of adding plus ones as we go along. You want to make sure that you're accepting the reality of change. Things are going to change. You are going to be in a different place, probably doing a different thing five years from now. You may not know it, you may not even realize it, but that's the way it's going to be.
And industries die, platforms go poof, look at the steel industry, the coal industry, the retail industry, the toy industry in retail, the video cassette industry the retail book industry. These are industries that, 10 years ago, people thought were rock solid. They will always have bookstores.
We do, but they're mom and pops now, right? And everything else is online. Web designing. 99 percent of it is templates now. It's not original coding. Social media advertising layout. I would say 85 percent of social media advertising layout is done in Canva or some sort of templated platform. Design.
As I said, it's moving towards AI, right? So you can't be comfortable in where you are. You have to work and always think about the plus one. You have to find and nurture alternate or additional skill sets. Say that again. You have to find and nurture alternate and additional skill sets.
If you are a graphic designer, learn some strategy. Learn some consumer insights work. Learn how to do trend, learn coaching, learn writing, learn photography, learn presentation skills, learn illustration, learn video editing, learn audio editing, learn coding, learn project management, learn financial planning, learn 3D animation.
Whatever it is, take your basic skill set and do a plus one. Every plus one that you do is number one. It's a curiosity, right? So like I said about curiosity before that may lead you to places that you don't really fully understand or know right now But when you get into it, those are the doors that open up, but it also is probably the most important aspect of career insurance that you can have is when you increase your skill sets.
There's the constant battle between should I be a specialist or a generalist? And I'm not saying that this is saying be a generalist. What I'm saying is that being a multi specialist is a great way to future proof yourself because it makes you open to that curiosity, that exploration, it makes you flex your muscles in terms of continuing to learn, and It will give you additional things that you can sell and offer in products and services in your agency.
It also gives you just yet one more skill that you can partner with other people to utilize.
Developing that plus one is, I think, one of the most important things to future proof yourself.
Every agency job I've ever had, I've been laid off from. And it was either, due to a financial downturn, and we lost a client, or there was a major, dot com bust. I've had my company acquired or taken control of by a different company who decided to reorganize and just get rid of a bunch of positions.
Assume one day that you are going to be laid off. Assume one day you're going to be laid off unceremoniously, no fault of your own. It's just going to happen. You want to make sure that you're prepared for it. And I tell you something, almost nobody prepares for it. That's the crazy thing. I act as a professional coach.
I actually coach a lot of executive coaches and in their own brand development, these executive coaches work with people in developing their careers and finding new jobs and stuff like that. So I hear a lot about this.
There might be a financial downturn. The company, for no fault of your own, might lose a client. They might get their client stolen by a different agency. Someone might come into their client's business and just decide to work with people they want to work with. No one's ever prepared for it.
Trying to make sure. That you are constantly keeping your eyes open and hedging your bets is a very important way to future proof yourself.
Number seven.
Learn to pivot.
Learn how to pivot when disruption happens. And become,, comfortable with the prospect of change. Having your mindset be open enough that you aren't completely locked into. And this, I'm circling back because at the very beginning I said don't have your personal identity so tied up in your job title.
Or the one particular creative thing that you do. That if that changes, that you suddenly, feel like there's a vacuum inside of you. You've lost your sense of personal identity. You want to make sure that you have multiple identities. You want to have multiple personalities. Because that will keep you open to the idea and the prospect of change when it comes down.
Keep your eyes open to the market. Trends change. Emerging technologies come along. Be prepared to move when the market moves. Look. Every five, eight years ago, everything moved from static images to video. So everything is video now. Almost every single social platform has moved to focusing almost entirely on video.
80 percent of the internet traffic in the world is video. There's AI in design. There are drones. There's virtual reality. There's augmented reality. There's, 3D headsets. There's, smart appliances. There's Internet of Things. Craft products. E commerce, e learning. Remote work. Who knew, that remote work would become the lifestyle for everybody on the planet? That is the kind of tectonic shift. that can happen overnight, no fault of our own, but those are the sorts of changes and I to make sure that you future proof yourself.
Thank you guys so much. It's been great talking to you. Until next time.