On employers and the creative’s toolkit

I have just come back from an Adobe event here in Singapore. The event was scheduled to run from 8am until noon, but it took me about 15min to figure out that I wasn’t going to get anything out of it. They were preaching to the converted, in my case. I was already sold on design as competitive advantage, and the migration to cloud tools. But I walked out of the room with a thought in mind. As access to the creative/software toolkit moves to the cloud — and Adobe is still a massive chunk of that — I have started to feel that it is the creative’s responsibility to own and pay for the access to the toolkit they need.

I have close to ten people in my creative team right now, and I am only one of two who have access to the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite. The reason for that is that I pay for the CC account myself, and I have done so for more than a year, even before I joined the agency I’m currently with. So you might say: well, that’s really the problem of the agency, who’s not investing appropriately on the software productivity of its employees. And although I certainly agree to that, the point here is that when someone in the creative team decides to leave, they’re going to have this situation of losing access to the enterprise cloud accounts through the company (with potential loss of cloud resources like brushes, files, templates, color palettes, etc).

Now extrapolate that to all other cloud-based creative resources out there: InVision, Shutterstock, Envato Marketplaces, Lynda.com training videos, etc. A pain in the ass to re-activate all these accounts under your own name every time. Much better to have them under your personal identity, and absorb these costs as part of your negotiated salary.

No?