Justin Bernardy
Listening to Brit tell her story was a great experience. Not only was she very transparent about herself, the realities of working in the industry, and her emotions and experiences, but she offered powerful advice. “Hard skills will get you the interview, but soft skills will get you the job”. This is simple but powerful. You can possess all the qualities of a good candidate , but if people can’t see the qualities that make you a good person then you are far less likely to succeed.
Since then, I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on my own hard and soft skills. Some of my hard skills include illustration, packaging, and 3d modeling. I enjoy the learning process immensely, and practice every single day. These are the skills that I hope will get me an interview one day, be that for an internship, job or etc. In terms of soft skills, I would say I have a strong work ethic, accountability, and respect/listening and understanding. I think I’m strong in these areas because I want to be a productive, respected, and responsible person. I want friends, coworkers, and peers to know without a doubt that they can trust and count on me, whether it be for work or just an open ear. That said, there are a number of soft and hard skills that I lack that tend to make my professional life more challenging.
In particular, the soft skills that I want to develop most are confidence and communication. I would even venture to say that my lack of communication stems from my lack of confidence in a lot of ways. I want to feel confident, so that I don’t always question my work and compare myself to others, so that I’m able to network and make friends, and so that I’m not afraid to present my ideas passionately and enthusiastically. Being confident will help me communicate more effectively, and communicating more effectively means being more effective in almost every other soft skill. For instance: with confidence I will be better at persuasion, and I’ll FINALLY be able to answer the questions of “How do I convince future clients to work with me?” and “How do I convince them that my designs are exactly what they are looking for?”. If that wasn’t enough, then I start to think that I would also be better at networking in general, and thus more able to find work, or inspiration, or even just make new friends.
In terms of hard skills, I am currently quite weak in typography, and not very well versed in a lot of industry standard software. For instance, I know the basis of adobe Illustrator and InDesign, but nowhere near enough to succeed professionally. Deeper than that though, is my need for development on the principles and theories of design. Knowing software is great, but more than that I need to understand composition, color, space etc. Essentially my goal is to develop an understanding of design that become like second nature to me, so I can be more independent and confident with my designs.