Interior Design Career Gridlocks

Interior design is a competitive business, design firm owners have plenty of tricks to prevent their employees from becoming their future competitors, besides asking you to sign non-competition agreement, here are some tricks usually employers used to block their employees' career path:


1. Dividing Tasks: You will only be asked to perform certain task(s). If you are a CAD drafter, then you will only do AutoCAD, you will never be asked to do purchasing, estimating, or supervising construction sites, or if you do purchasing, you will never get the chance to do AutoCAD or estimating, or you will only supervise construction sites without ever being asked to draw, purchase, or estimate. Even if you are asked to do CAD drafting, purchasing, job site supervision, you will never be asked to do contract signing, profit, over head, mark up calculations. By doing that, you will never be able to become a real professional interior designer because you do not know all aspects of design but few.

2. Selective Learning Opportunities: When you take CE courses, usually your employers will let you take those classes are solely about interior design, not those classes that will teach you how to run interior design business or how to do marketing.

3. Keep You In The Dark: You work your butt out on a project, but when the project is enrolled for a design competition or wins an award, your name will never be mentioned, or when the project is published on the magazines, your name will never be listed on the magazine. By keeping you in the dark, your talent will never be recognized, so for the potential clients out there, you will always be unknown to them.

Usually when the employer him/herself is a very talented and creative designer, he/she will be less likely to use these tricks on their employees, those who use these tricks are often the ones who do not have any talent or creativity but just business savvy. So, if you realize your employer is using these dirty tricks on you, please resign as soon as possible. Otherwise, you will never become a successful interior designer.