So I’ve been trying to study up recently on the latest creative suite from Adobe – Adobe CS3. On my personal computer about 4 years ago my ex boyfriend uploaded only Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2 for me. This has been quite helpful for me. So thanks, Jon. Anyway, when I left school CS was the highest version they had to teach us. Which shows I’ve been away from college for a few years now. Teaching myself is the only way for me to actually progress.
When I got home from my mission in 2007, CS3 was the new and cool thing. I tried to find a job as a graphic designer and started to find it extremely frustrating as I’d read each hiring requirement “Must be proficient in Adobe CS3.”
I took on jobs that obviously weren’t in my field (Special Education Para Professional) in order to earn some kind of cash while I tried to teach myself CS3. Finally someone gave me the chance to be a graphic designer as they noticed my skills when I’d applied for a different position. They, as luck would have it, had Adobe CS3. So I would plop myself down every morning and try to spend as MUCH time as I could playing around. My employer knew nothing about graphic design and couldn’t help when I had questions. She started placing me more into the role of office manager and I finally decided if I was to progress, like I knew I could, I needed a different graphic design job. I started looking again for work without her knowledge and was interviewed by my first big company.
At this point I was in school again and was starting to realize how I really was supposed to be a graphic designer. When I left school to serve my mission the school I’d attended was teaching only QuarkXpress. The students who started after I did were learning InDesign. They would NOT allow students who had already studied QuarkXpress to learn InDesign until after they graduated because then they could come back for free and study. I was far from graduating at that point and extremely frustrated with the school.
So 3 years later as I’m sitting in this office having never interviewed as a graphic designer before I was placed in a position that caught me completely off guard. I was asked to sit down at the computer and edit a project in InDesign CS3. If I didn’t show it on my face I felt it all alone – I was SCARED! I sat down and started looking for things that I would in QuarkXpress. At school people had told me InDesign was like Quark… I’ll be the one to tell you IT’S NOT!! It’s quite different! Thankfully the woman helped me as I started looking in the correct directions and tabs to find what was needed to edit. NOTE: To anyone who finds themselves in my same position, it is not a bad idea to tell them you don’t know a program. Just make sure you let them know what you do know and how you are a quick learner.
A few days later I interviewed for another job, was offered the position without having to do a test, and started the very next day. The previous company asked me in again for a second interview, but sadly I turned it down because I’d already started the new job.
As I started my new job I learned quickly InDesign. My first day I was shown my desk and PC (a complete upgrade from the PC laptop in the corner I had been working on at my previous job) and asked to make edits to a project in InDesign. They knew I didn’t know the program so the whole day (8 hours people) I spent fiddling around trying to figure it out. It took my new job 3 months to get Adobe CS3. I’ve only been using it for a week. But thanks to the fact that I had InDesign CS I was able to learn the program to a point I would have learned in school in only 2 months.
Today I am playing around on Adobe’s Video Workshop website. I’m learning so much! Even about the programs I already know! So I would recommend to ANYONE in my situation or even if you’re not, to go through the Help menu on the programs, to watch the videos, and learn as much as you can… Taking the time to educate yourself is the only way you can show employers and even clients that you are serious about your work and would like to progress. In the graphic design world you will always be doing this. If you’re the kind of person that gets comfortable in one sort of program and doesn’t ever plan to progress (like some photographers who never want to change to digital no matter how advanced the cameras get and become even better than 35mm film) you probably wont make it far in this field.
