I’m desperate, yes desperate. Where are advertising jobs being posted today? I’ve found tons of “entry level management” scams, but no real leads. If there’s anyone out there looking for a copywriter, please send me an email at adamthecreativewriter@yahoo.com. Yes, I know this is shameful self-promotion, but like I said, I’m desperate.
Besides my dilemna, where are all the jobs these days? There’s a ton of sales jobs open, gee I wonder why. I heard retail was the next big thing in this crummy economy. Retail sucks though, I work in it now. So where is the market going to be in the next 5 years?
I worked in sales for merchant services…g-d it sucked! I tried to get a few advertising jobs in Manhattan and I noticed they really liked the idea that I could use PhotoShop and Adobe Illustrator. My guess is that would be your first step. Art school or working in any industry that has anything to do with advertising helped a great deal as well. I worked for a theater house and made press releases, was a talent scout for a entertainment company (which actually taught me alot about the industry, Trans Continental Talent, it was a commission only job but it looked good on my resume, some people made tons of money doing this, they have over 80 offices around the country, check it out just for experience) and managed a band for a bit advertising for them. Little things like this made my experience look better. Because they offered the job to an employee’s cousin, I didn’t get it. I now work in the hotel industry…it’s a great job…all I do is stand around and BS with people and make sure they are happy, get what they need and give them info.
-M
I don’t know where you guys live but I was lucky to get a job a few months ago…no thanks to Bloomberg in NYC. Carrerbuilder wasn’t a great help. Turns out that the average number of responses from an ad listed in a website get’s up to 50-300!
-M
When I decided to try advertising, I called every agency in the yellow pages. Some arranged interviews. The job I accepted was in handling “traffic” – not in writing ads. Sometimes you have to be willing to work your way up.
So I take it you don’t want to be in advertising sales, right? Because those slots are always turning over. Low salary with good commission, sure. But they’re always there.
If you’re looking for an entry level job, forget copywriting. As Jonathan Chance says, try sales … or account handling, or general dogsbody. Perhaps there’s an opening in admin you could fill. The point is that without experience you’ll have little luck finding a creative position, so what you need to concentrate on is just getting your foot in the door.
Several people at the agency I work for have got a good start by coming in for “work experience” – basically working without pay, full or part-time, for a period of weeks or months. That may seem a high level of commitment, and of course not everyone can go for several months without income, but all of them got what employers are looking for – good experience, and all of them went on to good jobs, either with our agency or elsewhere.
As in many industries, who you know is at least as important as what you know, and if you’re around the office anyway you have more of a chance of spotting an opportunity and being able to say “Hey, I can do that”.
I can do a lot of other things, but I’m a writer first. What leads you to believe that there are less copywriters out there? Yes, I can write whatever crap a company tells me to, whether I believe in it or not. After all, it’s still writing and it still pays.