The DIY Guide to Career Change

In the late 2016 I decided to make a career change. The journey is by no means over, but here are the milestones I reached and lessons I learned so far:

Tina Remiz
Jul 28, 2017 · 5 min read

I majored in photography and journalism and worked in and around the media industry for half a decade before deciding it wasn’t for me. I had what some would consider a reasonably successful career as a documentary storyteller, meaning I had an ‘awards’ section on my CV (I still do), got occasional career advice requests from students and managed to secure enough side gigs to fund my self-initiated artistic explorations. Others, of course, would not consider this a career at all, but one has to pick their circle of friends carefully.

Portrait from a wedding I photographed a few weeks ago. Career change doesn’t happen over night, and I’m glad to pick up a camera every now and again.

I say I left photography about a year ago, but it’s not a profession you need to quit: work typically dries out as soon as you stop chasing it. Easy.

Being unsatisfied with your work is easy (hey, most people feel this way!). Finding a better alternative is the tricky part. Long (very long) story short, as 2016 was drawing to a close, I finally settled on design. This may sound like not much a career change at all, and indeed my potential employers are told that I have more than five years of professional experience in the field of visual communications, not that I started designing a couple of months ago. But the truth is, beyond the basic visual literacy, design requires another set of skills and a very different mindset. I didn’t feel like a complete fresher, but it certainly was a fresh start.

The case for DIY approach to education:

Since taking the plunge eight months ago, I spent roughly half of my time on an internship in a publishing house (mainly learning about the things I don’t want to do) and another half getting into design DIY-style. I briefly considered enrolling on a course, but decided against the idea at this stage. I reasoned that the main benefits of formal education will be:

  1. Knowledge: We live in the day and age when information is cheap and readily available to anyone with access to the Internet (or a local library) and basic research skills. I identified the main knowledge gaps and tried to fill them in with Coursera lectures, online tutorials and reading lists that are plentiful online (my recent favourite is this list with book recommendations for each step in the Design Thinking process).
  2. People: In university we were often told that students are the most important part of education, and it took some time to realise they weren’t merely referring to excruciatingly high tuition fees that were funding the whole gig. Being surrounded by people who are at the similar stage in their careers can be very inspiring and motivating, while getting regular feedback on your work is essential for any creative practice. I’m trying to fill this gaps by attending design meet-ups at least once a week and working from Google Campus canteen every now and again, but it does sometimes get lonely.
  3. Motivation: Staying on track with self-imposed deadlines is as hard as justifying taking a day off. Having someone else telling you what to do and when to do it makes life hell of a lot easier. I had to formalise the process as much as possible, breaking it down into semesters and even sketching a rough timetable for each week. I drafted two list — skills I want to improve and types of projects I want to work on — then paired them up loosely and ranked in order of priority. And, of course, putting all this into a sexy colour coded timetable is a must:
I made a detailed plan outlining where I am now, where I want to be and how to get there. I identified which skills I already have and which ones am I lacking, then planned what type of projects will showcase them best in my portfolio, then built my curriculum around it.

The only other advantage of formal education is a pretty diploma that you get at the end. It’s great for making your mum proud and not much else, so I decided, all in all, it wasn’t worth the time (and money), and I can do it just as well myself.

Lessons learned:

“Always end a personal story with a list of three things you learned in the process,” every journalism teacher in the world must have said every morning (why else would so many articles follow this mantra?). Seriously though, a lot of my nerve cells sacrificed themselves to teach me to:

  1. Take Time: Learning takes time, creating something worthwhile— even more so. Embracing this takes a lot of patience and discipline, but it’s a key to many doors that will otherwise stay locked. Most days though, I still act like a kid on a long train ride to the ZOO, constantly nagging at his my: “Are we there yet?”.
  2. Do Less. I have a curious mind and appetite for adventures, so time constrains is the biggest obstacle preventing me from getting involved into every new thing I come across. Taking a few months off to study seems like a great time to get back into running and brush up on Japanese, but these “hobbies” can also be incredibly distractive. I’m not advocating for a deep specialisation (both breadth and depth of knowledge have their merit), but doing a bit of a lot can create an illusion of progress when you substitute complex project with bitesize tasks that give you a fake sense of achievement.
  3. Better Done Than Perfect: No one wants to make work that sucks, so the natural tendency for many is to put that great idea aside until you get more skilled. But no one likes to work on ideas that have no potential for greatness either. As Ira Glass puts it:

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.”

Bridging the gap between ambition and output can be incredibly difficult, but you can’t make something without doing it and end up in a new place tomorrow, if you don’t set on a journey today.

Tina Remiz

Written by

I design creative solutions to social problems, tell stories through visuals, play with numbers. Love smart design and people that make me change my mind.

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