Jack of All Trades, Master of Some

When I was graduating college, the conventional wisdom was that you should find one thing to specialize in and become very, very good at it—like top 5% good. That was the path to creative success. But in the last 10 years, everything has changed.

Both in-house and agency creative teams are shrinking. In a creative economy where BBDO and Wieden+Kennedy are competing against 19 year-olds on TikTok for clientele, a large workforce becomes a major hinderance. And in-house teams are using online platforms to farm out much of their creative production. This isn’t to say that opportunities are drying up. Rather, expectations are shifting; small, flexible teams are on the rise; and the more tangible deliverables you can craft on your own, the more secure your position will be in the new economy.

To put it in simple terms, if you lack hard skills in a certain artistic discipline, you will need to pay or convince someone else to supplement your work with theirs, and it takes resources and time that we don’t have anymore. The best brand teams are continually shipping evergreen work while they also ride trends day to day. If you have to make a brief and shop it out to different vendors every time your team needs a photo, say—then you won’t be nimble enough to keep up with demand.

On the other hand, the more hard skills you have, the more leverage you will have in every group project, negotiation, or strategy meeting. At the end of the day, you know what it’s going to take to do the work. You know what’s possible. You know how to best spend the limited resources the team has. And you will develop a reputation for being an executioner—someone who gets shit done.

“Give me a big enough lever, and I can move the earth.”
-Archimedes

Almost all of the leverage I have ever gained in my career has come from having the hard skills necessary to do the job. For instance, I landed my current position as in-house Creative Director not only because of my talent for pitching, but I have a long history in commercial video production—something the brand needed a lot of.

Designing a path forward in a creative career is more straightforward than it’s ever been. Start with what you’re naturally drawn to and interested in. Solidify your expertise there and fill any gaps you’ve been avoiding looking at. Now move outward to adjacent skillsets. If you shoot photo, for instance, you should absolutely learn to shoot video on a basic level. It will take only 6-12 months of practice and experimentation, and you’ll already be better off than most photographers and half of videographers. If you’re a graphic designer, learn to do motion graphics and animation. You get it.

A well-rounded creative operator will be an expert at one thing, very good at 2 more, and passable at most everything else. The only justifiable blank spaces on your resume will be disciplines that are still in their budding stages and rely on technically intensive software—3D animation is the perfect example of this. Don’t waste your time. BUT, knowing where these gaps in your skillset lie is important because you will need to build a roster of 2-3 creatives you can call on at the drop of a hat to deliver what you can’t.

Lucky for us, we can develop passable skills for next to nothing today. Below I have compiled a list of a few free or very affordable resources for diving into a new discipline and acquiring those golden hard skills.

Video

You can find endless content on the technical aspects of video, but this is a great affordable resource on the principles that make videos work.

This guy makes some of the best, most tactical content around cinematography. Great for people who want to make beautiful imagery.

Photo

Super fun 8-bit tool that teaches you the basics of what the manual settings on your camera do.

Incredible free resource for learning the basics of photography. All text-based, blog-style, but it honestly doesn’t get better than this in terms of pound-for-pound beginner instruction. So much love for the craft poured into this.

Design

This may be the most comprehensive, free resource for learning design on the internet. Similar to the photo class above, there’s an incredible amount of love poured into this. Start here.

Allan’s main schtick is redesigning famous company logos (like Shell or Uhaul). He walks you through his thought process and the decisions he makes with the designs, and the work is really good!

Conclusion

This is about becoming someone that can’t be ignored. If you have the drive to tackle any creative problem that’s thrown your way, the habit of delivering work on the regular, and the ability to make it good enough, you will have the midas touch that all those soft-skill guys are looking for after they close the sale and the real work is supposed to begin.

Remember, all these things can be learned. You can do it all. Dig in, and stay dangerous.