Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Is experience a good thing?

The Egotist is running a series of posts from jobseekers. In one, a designer named Kammerer included his 21 years of experience without citing any brands he'd worked on or awards he'd won. I posted a comment that read, in part:

Is citing how many years of experience you have really a plus? At a certain point, people look at your resume and say, “If you have that many years of experience, you should have won a certain number of awards, made creative director, worked at some great shops, and so on.” Your experience starts to work against you.


For instance, Anomaly ECD and 2007 Denver 50 judge Mike Byrne starts his bio this way:

Mike Byrne is a former Creative Director at Wieden+Kennedy Portland, where he served as the co-creative chief for the agency's cornerstone Nike account from 2000 - 2006. During his tenure, W+K Portland amassed more awards than any other agency in the United States including two 'Agency of the Year' honors.


I'm not trying to call anyone out, especially not the designer in question. I'm just wondering how many years of experience you can have before people start to raise their eyebrows and wonder why you haven't been promoted.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

For creatives, perhaps the larger problem is why are people weighing so heavily on experience.

I can name more than a few handfuls of non-senior art directors and writers whose worst ads in their books are light years ahead of the best ones in some VP/ECD's.