Internship In Agency VS In-House

I’ve had the pleasure (and, somewhat, luck as well) to have worked in three different contexts in graphic design for the past year and a half.

The main point of this article is to tell you the differences in those three contexts so that:

(1) it can help you make a decision about where you see yourself working at;

(2) I can get feedback about other people’s experiences about working in an agency VS in-house.

College, why did you do this to me?

Straight out of college, and just like many people out there (and about 95% of the people who graduate from the same college as me), I felt a little bit lost and unsure of what I really wanted to do with my life. I knew I had learned a lot in three years, but I felt that I knew nothing (or at least that I knew nothing in particular).

I graduated in Audiovisual and Multimedia, in Lisbon, and my degree always seemed hard to explain to other people because we are taught a little bit of everything. The idea was that we need to know everything in real life — we are taught that we need to be unicorns, basically.

I learned a lot from how to be a camera operator, to edit short movies, web design and coding, branding and packaging, … All this, while learning really interesting stuff like anthropology…

Feeling that I wasn’t prepared for the real world, I signed for a Graphic Design course. Much like a General Assembly course, it was supposed to be a one-year intensive course where I’d learn more about design, illustration, typography, motion graphics and web design. Things that I already knew, but needed and wanted to learn more.

At the same, I started working part-time as a Graphic Design Intern in the same school where I was starting the course.

Is this real life?

Being my first real-life job as a graphic designer, I tried to follow my superior’s suggestions, feedback, and insights as much as I could. I really wanted to do my best. Competitive as I am, I also wanted to do better than the last intern they had.

I stayed there for six, almost seven, months and I can tell you that what I got from that experience is that without good management it’s impossible to do a great job.

They didn’t know what they wanted until it was too late. They didn’t give briefings and then complained because what I did had nothing to do with what they had in mind. They made me do more than I was hired for and made me feel that I still wasn’t doing enough, … Basically, they were the worst client you can ever have.

Unfortunately, this is what you can find out there as clients: people that don’t know what they want, don’t know how to do it but will treat you as if they knew better than you.

Can’t stop, won’t stop

Since I didn’t need money to survive at the time (being a typical Portuguese girl still living with her parents at age 21), I quitted and applied to an agency.

When I started there, I was very insecure about my work (not that I’m the most secure person now, but I’m getting better!) and didn’t put myself out there as much as I could. Why is that important? Because people only noticed me after months working there (and I’m talking about an agency with 8 designers at the time).

The work life in an agency can be non-stop, not just the workload, but also the creative part required. Even if you have time to complete a task or a project, there’s a demand for its uniqueness.

And since you don’t always know how your clients think, you’ll have to be prepared to come with 5 different concepts for the same project.

Usually, we’re talking about big companies with marketing teams behind it that keep changing, growing or don’t really know what they want and need to be amazed.

But more than that, you do not choose who your clients are in an agency and you have to keep in mind that even the smallest work is important, every client needs to be happy with the outcome and that, as my creative director at the agency once said:

“Your work stops being yours when it gets to the client for the first time. From that point on, the client will try to make it his own”.

Can’t stop me now

Now, I’m a girl that likes change, so I packed my things and came to live in Berlin. (Great plot twist, right?)

Said goodbye to (very sunny) Lisbon and the agency way of living and started working in a German startup.

This is my third internship and I can say that it has nothing to do with the other two. And with this, I don’t mean that I’m learning more now or that I like one better. The biggest difference I’m finding in the three contexts I worked in is the companies’ working processes (or lack thereof).

Agency VS In-house: the final fight

Agency life

At the agency, the designer wouldn’t get the task before the account and the creative director saw it, evaluated it and defined its priority. Then the task would be assigned to one of the designers (most of the work was done individually) and he would receive a briefing.

From then on, I would work mostly on my own and with the copywriter in the creative part. Every question and doubt I’d have, I’d have to go to the account, that knew the clients, and he would ask or talk with them.

And then it would come in waves of changes from the clients. Millions of notes from them saying to change this and that, the color, the size of the font, the size of the logo, the order, … And the work would go on changing until it was perfect for them.

In-house of the rising sun

At the startup, however, every designer knows the tasks that we as a team are going to have to do, and then we as a team decide who is going to do what — based on the skills that each of us have or want to develop.

Since we don’t work with “outsiders”, we know who’s asking us to do what, we can go to them everytime we need more information or need to understand the request more (and even if we need a little bit more time to complete the task).

Here the communication is open and we all know how the company is going, what we achieved until now and what are our goals for the next quarter. I can (and am motivated by my leader to) ask different departments what their work is, how our product works and what is their part on it.

Here, even though we’re separated by departments, we are working towards the same goals.

Although this should be the perfect example of what working in-house is, we all know it is not.

At the school that I worked at (and if you’re still reading, I hope you remember what I’m talking about), there were no processes. Things were made because either the director of the school wanted or because the Communication Coordinator thought that it could be a good idea. There was no planning and no communication strategy.

The outcome of this was no engagement on their social media, close to no people ever went to the events they did and promoted, and an unmotivated feeling among the interns in general.

So even though I liked designing, I didn’t like going to work, which made me realize that the people who work with you can be just as important as the work you do.

Final chapter

After all this talk, my advice is:

We are all different people and there’s a lot of different companies out there. What works with me may not apply to you. But wherever you work, make yourself noticeable, try to participate, try to learn more, ask questions, help when you see that it’s needed and not just when asked to. That won’t make you the most important part of the company, but sure do will make you learn, improve and be an asset there.

If you’re still reading this, thank you. I hope you didn’t get too bored with the story of my life and found something that could be usefull to you here.