Oh, job listings…

We know that a lot of employers love to combine three roles into one to pay less money, and anyone in a creative field knows how this goes.

You’re browsing through listings. You see one that you know you would absolutely crush at a company that sounds decent, and so you put your best foot forward, send them your portfolio, and then continue down the list. A few days later (if you’re fortunate), you get a call inviting you to an interview. You attend the interview, and sooner or later, you hear this:

“We LOVE your work and we think you would be a great addition to the team, however we can’t afford to pay you [your rate], but we can offer you [lower rate] or an unpaid internship.”

Alt text: Man looks at someone sideways then walks away.

Bills don’t stop because you’re offering me an unpaid internship. They also don’t stop when you’re offering to pay me $14.50 per hour for 20 hours a week to do all of your creative work, pitch in with customer service, and whatever else you want to add onto my list of duties and responsibilities.

Oh, and hey, exposure doesn’t put food on the table. Let’s keep it all the way real.

As someone who did an unpaid internship after applying for paid positions and receiving rejection emails or no responses at all when trying to break into graphic design, I can say that unpaid internships aren’t the best idea unless you have more than enough money in the bank to live on or can rely on the bank of your parents, partner, etc., while you do it.

I know that was blunt, but it’s true.

I watched every dollar that went out of my bank account during those five months, and honestly, God clearly has me, because looking back, I don’t know how I managed to do that financially.

Seriously.

I wasn’t making consistent money at the time when I was doing background extra work for film and TV shows. I barely scraped by, and I pretty much survived on Tim Hortons food and snacks from home and Dollarama. I was commuting to another city for said internship. I figured, “You know what, you’ll make it work. You have to, so if this means it’s going to finally get you a paid position, do it.”

Sometimes I got a free breakfast at the internship, but again, free breakfast doesn’t pay bills now, does it? I left that internship wondering if I was really cut out for the design world. Did I want to have to work a graphic design job for peanuts, then be stressed about money, and have to pick up one or two side hustles to make ends meet? This was also five years ago and the cost of living is even worse now.

It was a difficult time, because here was this thing I loved and I knew I was meant to do, but I needed experience in order to get a job. A company won’t hire me without work experience and then I’m back to where I started. Let’s not even get on the topic of the amount of postings I saw during that time that stressed applicants needed to have a degree in graphic design. 🙄

Plenty of people today have learned skills on their own and are largely self-taught, myself included. So to constantly see that I need to have a degree or attend a bootcamp in UI/UX/graphic design/insert whatever else here before I can even be considered for a job is wild to me.

Degrees cost money. So do bootcamps, and again, everyone cannot afford to do that. I say, if someone has a strong portfolio, a willingness to learn, and the passion to get the work done, why not take a chance on that candidate? And so, I relied on my experience to come up with this week’s exercise.

It’s a huge part of the reason why I decided do things myself. I became tired of waiting for people to take a chance on me and took the chance on myself. I create my own content and products now, I’ve started up my own Etsy shop, I have plans to add my own shop to this site in the future. While there are times I wonder if I should just stick to retail, I know that eventually this will be my full time job and then I can finally let that retail job go.

Until then, it’s work, work, work, work, work.

Before I forget, I recently added some new templates to my Etsy shop: the Pinterest pin templates and the Wild Heart Instagram puzzle template!

I know people are looking for ways to speed up their content creation or just want an easy way to get the look they want without having to create things from scratch and spend a ton of time on them. If that sounds like you, check them out! I always include a PDF with instructions to the Canva link and in the case of the puzzle template (and future ones) some video tutorials are also included! (Yes, they’re all customizable!)

Catch you next week. Toodles.