Design Your Career with a Whiteboard by Marshall Vandruff

Design Your Career with a Whiteboard
Art students get degrees. A year later, they can’t get work as artists. They call me for help.

I’m never surprised. Getting work is difficult. It often takes more energy to get clients, or a job, or a supportive fan-base, than it takes to get through school.

My response to these students is “First, get a Whiteboard…”

A dry-erase board in your studio is one of the most valuable tools for designing your career. You fill it up with a chaotic mix of your skills and interests, your contacts and options, your dream job and your current responsibilities, then you seek connections and consolidations, gradually evolving the chaos into hopeful order. A whiteboard is a map of the uncharted territory of your career as you explore it, and maps help you get where you want to go.

In August of 2014, I presented a two hour seminar at Fullerton College showing how this approach has helped me and how it could help anyone seeking a career in the arts. We recorded the seminar. Since then, my editor and I have refined this video into a boiled-down-to-the-best-of-it presentation.