Pros
- Gives hope, skills and opportunities for young new professionals. - Some really great co-workers - A lot of room for creativity (at first)
Cons
This is my honest opinion. I do not mean to hurt the company, just want to protect future employees from going through what I went through. I give my pros and cons from a perspective from someone in a creative department position. I am a creative. - Get rid of an idea of work-life balance. That does not exist in the company. They try to tell you to unplug at least one day during the weekend. Meaning they expect you to work 6 days a week. You "make" your work day. Meaning you can start your day at 6am and end right at 5pm, but only if you get all your work done. You can start right at 9am and end at 8pm, but only if you get all your word done. With the type of work and the deadlines you are given, you will find your self working on something until about 5 mins before it is due. Meaning you are in crunch culture 24/7 and your work will show after a month of doing this straight. NO CHANCE you will get overtime pay. - The type of work turned I was expected to do was suppose to be unique, creative and out-of-the-box. However with the type of partners and clients we had this was not the case. The work turned into just making it to get it done. I couldn't push the creative boundaries and create work that was awesome because that type of work can't be rushed and I was constantly rushed. They only care about winning awards. If your work is not "award-winning", they look over it. - Feedback and team collaboration is impossible because everyone is too busy to give thoughtful feedback. Doesn't matter anyways, you can create something with the most thought and research but if the management team or the client doesn't like or understand it, its out the window. - There is a MAJOR disconnect between the sales team because the sales team will over deliver or set the expectation too high or say the creative team will do something that is not something we actually can do. Then at the end of the day it is the creative team's fault that we can't do something that is not even within our job description. - I feel naked, unprotected and a dark figure is standing over me. By this I mean, I feel left in the middle of nowhere to fend for myself by management. I didn't get proper training, had to learn every things on my on or through Google. There is only one person who could properly train me but she is literally in meetings from 8am to 6pm and is so busy. When a partner is mad, they go straight to upper management rather than trying to fix with their team, but I don't blame them because we don't know how to fix it, but management gets mad at us when we don't know what to do. But how are we suppose to know? - IF YOU ARE A CREATIVE, prepare to be in a position where you CANNOT be creative. You think you will have the chance when first meeting a partner, but then it turns out the partner doesn't like it because it is TOO out of the box or too creative. They would rather have easy, template like, cookie cutter designs. This could be avoid if the sales teams could have the chance to vet and only move forwards with partners/clients that agree with their "so called value of out of the box design" but they can't because they are more worried about the number of partners increasing so they can make more money. Long story short, they would rather increase their numbers and money than work with people that actually want to be unique in design. They care more about money and numbers than supporting their team when they ask for help. - When you say you are drowning in work, they will tell you then you will not get a raise or bonus if you want to lower you workload. I understand where they are coming from but honest for me it not about the money, its about being able to create amazing work. That is MORE important to me than money, and I thought more meaningful work was more important than money to them too, I was wrong. smh. - Lastly, when I was leaving, management said they had no idea of myself struggles and I should have told them sooner. But how can I tell them when I know they will no do anything but tell me its head trash and its my responsibility to work harder. They need to create a safe space if they care as much as they say they do. - 50% of the work you do is "trying-to-catch-up" work or is "saving-your-butt" work, 45% is in unproductive meetings and the other 5% is actual fun, creative work - They set you up in tribes which is essentially your team you work with on projects, but they don't strategies how they set you up. They set up the most experience people together and then the most in-experince together and then expect the most inexperience team to do the EXACT same as the people who have been their twice as long. Does that seem fair? NO. - Design and creativity is all about the process and research, how ever prepare to throw that out the window because you will never have the chance to do so. So goodbye to the design process.
