Layer Cake

“Must have ten years plus in the same role…in the exact same industry…servicing similar clients to those we work with….must be recommended by people who look sound and work strictly in the fashion we do always have always will. Must be a clone of our current employees to be interviewed by clones of our previous employers….”

One blink on to our linked in feed and we’re swarmed with reems of frustrated, long out of work excruciatingly talented job seekers who are whacked across the head with the rejection of “lack of or irrelevant” experience knocking them out of the race to securing a position.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the course of my varied and fascinating career (so far) about how important it is to recognise the varied and valuable layers of experience that have gone into making the person sat in front of you in the interview chair who they are, and recognising that you’re buying in to them, as a human, as a whole not the sum of their CV’s parts.

We’re all a delicately crafted, personalised multi layered cake to be celebrated and savoured, not a carbon cookie cutter factory homogenised copy of each other. I’ll explain.

Choosing a recipe to follow can be an underestimated and difficult task.

I started university with no ideas of a job role I thought could be right for me. A fairly studious young woman, it seemed impossible to choose a clear path towards a career as the academic arena in the UK promotes a top soil scattergun approach sewing seeds of interest and insights across dozens of subjects without enough teaching staff to recognise either students’ talents or particular passions. The road was wide the segwayed paths numerous and the treasure chest of gainful employment at the end seemed elusive and vague.

Stick with the flavours you love, so the taste should be enjoyable no matter the outcome of the bake.

One excellent piece of advice I latched on to at a juncture point to choosing a higher education route was to “stick with a subject you love” and the money..I supposed, would follow.

That’s not quite what happened, but it was a valuable starting point. Half way through an undergraduate qualification in Visual Communications, which had exposed me to different design disciplines as well as thinking about audience interpretation of visuals and copy; I was given the option to continue to degree, or leave with the qualification achieved thus far. I tried the degree, why not, I was still no clearer on which direction I might be able to attain any work in, but three or four months into the extended course, after undergoing more of - what seemed to me - irrelevant modules in film creation and cinema history, bored and confused, I left.

If you’re finding the recipe hard to follow, look around for different ways of learning to bake.

There was a photography studio in the small town I lived in and armed with next to no knowledge about how to operate a camera but a glimmer of joyful memory that the brief photography related part of my course was something I’d really enjoyed, I turned up with a determination to volunteer there until either they paid me or I’d learned enough about the craft to apply for a job somewhere else. What could go wrong?!

It turns out, with that attitude not much. A youthful calculated risk which forced me into an escalated practical and steep learning curve with hands-on experience of the worlds of event, studio, wedding, fashion and product photography which I’d never had any concept of before. I loved it but the location of the studio was always going to limit the exposure I craved to bigger more exciting opportunities. I needed to be in London.

Once you’ve honed a recipe, try experimenting with variations before moving on to something new altogether.

Fast forward ten years and over periods of freelancing and working inhouse for photography agencies, running teams large and small, travelling extensively on commissioned projects, hosting photography training events and specialising in various strains of the artform I fell nicely into the role of producer, and it wasn’t long before I ended up trying my hand at advertising shoots. Fast paced with large teams of multiple disciplines I got closer and closer to the more conceptual beginnings of projects and I craved to be nearer to those moments the brand managers or business owners would pick a creative direction - before they came to me to execute.

Once you're confident you’ve learned the general principles well, try something new.

I saw an administrative position advertised for a branding agency in a trendy part of town and thought…again why not. Feeling like I’d learned all I could in the arena of image creation, why not go back a step and be around the concept stage. It was a bit of a step backwards in terms of my position as I’d started to become well known enough to lead large scale projects in the production world but I’d found myself a bit bored and hungry for new learnings so I went along to the interview I’d been invited to and got offered the job, and a whole new world of perspective.

Make extra mix, just in case the cake in hits the fan.

Starting out with entirely new sets of parameters to understand, and the industry and sometimes company specific lingo that comes along was intimidating. I will forever be grateful to the hiring manager that took a risk choosing someone from a production background into the massive whirring cogs of the branding machine I found myself in and to justify the hire I can honestly say I worked harder then I had in my life. Similar to the immersive and fast paced experience of learning photography on the job, I was very often one of the first few in the office and as I recognised tasks were taking me longer than those with a more branding specific background, I lived by a mantra of never spilling over into the next day a task I’d been asked to complete that day, often leading to long evenings in the studio to fill in the gaps in my knowledge before starting and completing my work. I was thrilled at what I was learning but before too long covid hit, and mass redundancies followed, with the realisation that the last one in, the new-ish somewhat risky hire, still on probation, was most definitely going to be the last one out.

With a wave of resilience and a swarm of new found friends and confidence at having excelled in a completely new environment however, I buoyed my spirits.

Begin to assemble your layers.

Looking out at a world hiring freeze was tough, I’d had a moderate payout and calculated how long I could eek that out living frugally but it was really time to get creative with the skills I’d honed - across both industries - and apply confidently and eloquently to every role I saw going which I felt I could in all earnest apply myself to. Having such a wealth of experience managing teams of people I ended up as a community manager for a time at a coworking space which was fun if very unfulfilling until the idea dawned on me to approach a company I’d admired from afar for a very long time, something between creative agency and production actually who’d been one of the canaries in the covid mine, I pitched an entirely new business plan to them and somehow convinced them to take a punt making use of their currently dormant assets to create a kind of motion e-commerce passive income. We had some success. I eventually left that position to transfer my skills across to social media and then again eventually returned to the world of branding.

The Frosting on the cake.

I sit, writing this, on a completely different continent to the one all of these experiences (minus the travel years) took place. I’ve moved to Singapore, for love only the very best of reasons to travel; and I find myself embarking on a new path again. Throughout all of the experiences I’ve had the thread tying them together was creativity, the story of a thing, the meaning behind something and searching for where that meaning might fit in the world, the marketplace, my personal identity.

I’ve always loved to write, and there has been some secret passion like that about most individuals I’ve ever interviewed for a position on one of the many teams I’ve been a part of. The frosting of them. The part of the person their CV might not shout about that you only find out when meeting and talking to them. They love to garden and tend to their green pets, they make jewellery, they organise large dinner parties. The bit that makes them unique, and the bit we all like the most lets be honest.

Enjoy

Cake recipes can result in a thousand different iterations of bakes, they will one hundred percent not all be to everyone’s taste, but certainly for me the layers of experience I’ve had in such different companies working with such a massive variety of people has given me an overview of the world of employment, the interview process, the ways to integrate into teams, how to absorb the culture of a workplace, and so many more advantageous strings to my bow then anyone who might technically fit the “desired” criteria of the exaggeratedly narrow minded linked in job post requirements above.

We all deserve to have our layers of varying expertise and transferable skills appreciated as likely to lead to better creative thinking, and a tastier cake.

Layers imply time has been invested, implies uniqueness. And that’s a thing necessary to create a well rounded healthy place to work.