{"id":395,"date":"2005-11-03T10:16:25","date_gmt":"2005-11-03T14:16:25","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=395"},"modified":"2005-11-05T18:37:02","modified_gmt":"2005-11-05T22:37:02","slug":"the-creative-career-path","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/?p=395","title":{"rendered":"The Creative Career Path"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well this is truly the first time I&#8217;ve heard a top-level executive <em>seriously<\/em> say something like this: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I&#8217;m going to run an innovation group, and I&#8217;m going to hire highly creative people, design backgrounds, people who have proven their ability to think outside the box. And then I&#8217;m actually going to create some sort of career path within innovation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> That&#8217;s Mary Jo Cook, the new business vice-president for Clorox&#8217;s  laundry home-care division in an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/innovate\/content\/nov2005\/id20051102_204917.htm\">interview<\/a> over on BusinessWeek.<\/p>\n<p>Years ago, as I was planning my move into ID, I went looking for some information on career paths. I was lucky enough to come across a business article in the San Diego Union-Tribune that included quotes from Nissan Design International&#8217;s VP of Design, <a href=\"http:\/\/64.233.161.104\/search?q=cache:4gg08fENtFwJ:www.cia.edu\/pdf\/gerald-hirshberg.pdf+gerald+hirshberg&#038;hl=en\">Gerald Hirshberg<\/a>. Not knowing who he was or the status he had within the design community, I sent him a couple of letters with some questions. Fortunately he was kind enough to respond. One of those questions was: &#8220;What&#8217;s the career path for an industrial designer?&#8221;. That apparently confused him as he basically wrote back: <em>There is no path. You either make it or you don&#8217;t<\/em>. Brutal. And in truth, that&#8217;s still largely how the field works. The designer&#8217;s career path &#8211; if you&#8217;re lucky enough to even get onto it &#8211; usually dead-ends with &#8220;Design Manager&#8221;, a position normally equivalent to Project Manager on a development team. It&#8217;s a low ceiling. And it&#8217;s still rare to hear of designers as senior executives at large corporations. Perhaps influential types like Ms. Cook can help to remove that barrier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well this is truly the first time I&#8217;ve heard a top-level executive seriously say something like this: I&#8217;m going to run an innovation group, and I&#8217;m going to hire highly creative people, design backgrounds, people who have proven their ability &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/?p=395\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-administrative"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rebang.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}