Its now been over 3 years since I graduated from Liverpool John Moores, we all had our day at the Cathedral in the robes and mortarboards, unfortunately it was a pretty windy day in Liverpool that day but at least it wasn’t raining like it has been this July.
A great deal happens in 3 years, if your anything like me most people you spent 3 or 4 years with working hard to get your degree will have moved away and you will speak to them once in a while (even the ones you still live relatively near). Thats life though, it moves on.
For me I have worked for two different web companies in Liverpool and now working for a company called Creative Play in Chester, not too far from the Deva Stadium.
There are differences with working in an agency vs part of the ‘in house’ web team. Working on a smaller set of priorities and tasks allows you to spend more time to experiment, I say more time but don’t misread me here you can’t spend days working on a simple task as there is still deadlines and other work to get done during an average week, its hard work all the same.
When working for an agency, even a fairly small one, you tend to concentrate on one main area, some may be designers, some SEO experts and other developers. When this happens your skills and ideas compliment each other. When you are a much smaller team, as in my case a team of one, there is just you so you must be ready to become an army of one and try your hand at whatever comes up, from looking at SEO reports to amending the site template and building emails to writing content for the company blog.
3 years ago I wouldn’t have had a clue how to do any of this stuff outside of building webpages and doing the odd bit of design work, but working closely with people from other fields and spending hours reading blogs from experts helps. Working at Creative Play has been a challenge and when going solo (to a point) you have to step up and learn to juggle…luckily for me theres an entire team of guys and girl who are working on product design and print marketing and the Directors are heavily invested into expanding the website so I have a massive amount of input and feedback.