w+k platform

Wieden + Kennedy London have set up a thing called Platform. As the name suggests it's a way for talented people to find their way into advertising and other creative industries. Not just w+k and not just writers and art directors.

Here's the official blurb:

"Platform is a future creative talent platform, which will hire, teach and work with a diverse mix of people, from around the world. We will recruit talent from the arts, sciences and technology backgrounds who will work together to solve business problems through creative solutions. You will learn by doing which means being involved in everything from building prototypes, enabling and assisting in research development to curating your very own event space and programme."

If you are reading this and you're a design student who's just graduated and you're worrying about finding a job (and you should be worried about that) then you could do a lot worse than apply for this. There's a simple brief to answer and they'll pay you £250 a week for 6-9 months.

You should apply. The deadline is tomorrow so you'll need to be quick. But you should still do it. Stop watching the cricket. Apply.

Comments

[Pete]

That's £250 a week for 6-9 months.

Just incase anyone is wondering how they can live off £250 for for 9 months!

[Ben]

Good point Pete, I'll amend.

[Jonathan]

£1000 a month is not the way to attract top talent into the industry. Schemes like this should be attacked, not praised. There may be a shortage of graduate-level positions around, but the going rate in other industries is still £20-25k a year.
Considering that the creative industries are currently busy lobbying government to be taken seriously based on their status as the third biggest contributor to the economy, they need to start putting their money where their mouth is.

Wieden and Kenneyd can well afford to pay the going rate for graduate talent and if they did, they'd soon find themselves deluged with applications from the brightest and the best from all sectors. Everyone's a winner.

[Jonathan]

Yep, I also read the RSS feed thinking it was £250 total for the 6-9months, and thought this was a sarcastic post!

[Ben]

Jonathan, I think £1,000 a month for this sort of scheme is generous. Especially in a recession.

But I'll ask w+k to comment.

[Jonathan]

£1000 is not generous! It's a joke. Other industries are not paying staff £1000/month, especially not graduates.

It's only generous compared with the even worse situation of unpaid "internships" which the design industry seems to cling on to (recession or not) while simultaneously claiming they can't get quality staff.
Any guesses when the connection between the two will click in to place?

Successful businesses pay talented staff decent wages. The sooner we stop the notion that graduates should work for nothing, or next to nothing, the sooner we become a proper industry.

Look at Next's graduate package (picked at random): http://careers.next.co.uk/trainees/benefits.aspx#link=tmb

The salary starts at £18K+, rises over the year, there's a structured training programme leading to management-level positions and benefits (a pension! Shares scheme! Free transport! Season tickets!) that aren't to be sneezed at. The programme's recognised by other employers meaning you don't have to start another training scheme if you decide to go somewhere else.

If schemes like Next's (and hundreds of other employers) were copied in the design industry it would transform overnight.
Big lesson of the recession: invest in talent.

Who can afford to live in London on £1000 a month? There's a reason the design industry is dominated by white upper/middle class males. They're the only ones with parents rich enough to bankroll them.

It's an appalling practice, and an appalling excuse. Can you imagine *any* other industry or sector getting away with it? Teaching? The police? Law? Medicine? Steel?

Interns and graduates on low salaries contribute a massive amount to the bottom line of many many design firms. If they disappeared tomorrow those firms would be screwed. That alone demonstrates their true worth. And people should be paid according to the contribution they make.

I'm sorry but it beggars belief that firms that subscribe to the principles here: http://www.no-spec.com/ should simultaneously believe paying crap wages (or no wages at all) is acceptable. Double standards, I reckon. Even worse when you dress it up as a "competition" like it's some sort of make-it-big talent contest-cum-reality TV show.

Whatever happened to job interviews?

[Lauren Currie]

"If you are reading this and you're a design student who's just graduated and you're worrying about finding a job (and you should be worried about that)"

I am literally shocked. I would like to ask why I should be worried? Designers are needed now before than ever. They are part of the solution to many problems we are facing. The demand for creative thinking is growing every day.

Perhaps, I should be worried that I have a degree related to an industry who do not value their students? Who do not value the fresh insight we bring and the questions we ask - questions that the 'experts' very often forget to think about.

Since high school I have been told - to be a designer - at first you have to be prepared to work for little or next nothing.

Nonsense.

People who value work that another person does for them - pays fairly.

Practitioners who value the process of learning students go through and their energy and eagerness to learn - give them opportunities...without expecting them to live on beans and toast.

[Dan]

I'm not sure I understand the argument here at all: the amount that a new graduate is paid is simply economic supply and demand, i.e. thousands upon thousands of new grads wanting to pursue a career in the creative industries versus the (presumably) much fewer wanting to pursue a career at Next...

(Comparing this to a Next grad scheme is a huge WTF in my mind...)

I personally think that £1000 a month from an incredible agency is very generous indeed. When I started in the creative industries I was paid a big fat zero for about 6 months, then about £50 a week for 3 months, and only then progressed to be paid a full graduate package, and this was all within the same company who were deluged with eager intern applications every day. It was difficult but was worth it in the long term, and only serves to make you fully understand whether your heart is in the industry.

(If you're considering W+K *and* Next, go for Next.)

The massive downside from my point of view is that paying little means that generally those who have the means to commute or stay in London for little money get a look-in to the creative industries. These leads to an unhealthy skew towards wealthy/middle-classes/etc. which doesn't necessarily lead to the best candidates.

So this is the tricky question, and I'm not sure what the answer. But asking ad and design agencies to pay law firm/banking salaries is a totally unrealistic one.

[Jonathan]

"When I started in the creative industries I was paid a big fat zero for about 6 months, then about £50 a week for 3 months, and only then progressed to be paid a full graduate package, and this was all within the same company who were deluged with eager intern applications every day. It was difficult but was worth it in the long term, and only serves to make you fully understand whether your heart is in the industry."

That's the old argument: "I had to do this so why shouldn't others".
The whole "deluged with eager grads" argument doesn't hold water either. It's *not* a supply and demand issue. The point is, people should be paid based on their contribution. Paying people based on the number of applicants for the job is one step removed from the sort of slave labour you see in far eastern factories. It is morally reprehensible and makes no long term economic sense.

What's more, the design industry has always paid sod all to new entrants - claims that it's because there are too many graduates or that there's a recession on are so much bullshit it's unbelievable.

If you have someone working for you on a job that is earning your company money, you should pay that person a fair share. There is no possible counter-argument to that.

Comparing it to Next is not a WTF - it's a sound argument. The retail industry, the construction industry, law, medicine, teaching all treat their graduates well. They too have a glut of people wanting to get in (moreso than the design industry), but instead of driving down wages it merely increases attempts to secure the best graduates. Because they see graduates as a way to inject new ideas and new thinking into their business. That is worth a lot of money, and it's only right that the best talent gets a decent salary. The glut of graduates this year has not led to a fall in starting salaries, only a slow down in increases - exactly what's happened to everyone else's salaries (except Premiership footballers).

Compare that with the design industry. We won't do proper job interviews, we won't offer you a job. Instead we'll "try you out" for nothing and pretend that the privilege is all yours and you should feel lucky to be here. And after six weeks we'll say thanks and get the next lot in.
Any graduate worth their salt would look at that and go and do something else where they're respected.
(Read "The Rise of the Creative Class" and you see evidence of exactly that - talented graduates taking jobs in coffee shops not because they couldn't get a job anywhere else but because the job made them feel valued. The big lesson from the research in that book is that if you want the best talent, you have to offer something in return. The British design industry has not learnt that lesson and it needs to. Rapidly.)

Ben said this deal was generous given we're in a recession. No, it's counterintuitive. You cannot build a creative team based on ephemeral employment methods. You build it on value, respect and two-way long-term commitment.

You say "But asking ad and design agencies to pay law firm/banking salaries is a totally unrealistic one."
No it isn't. We're talking £22-25k in the first couple of years. That's the starting salary in law firms and banks, and other areas too. Maybe you're thinking of high flying barristers? Well their salaries aren't far removed from the MDs of some design firms so it follows that the career and salary structure could match a bit more at junior levels. A salary isn't an expense, it's an investment. An employee should be contributing their salary's worth and more.

(Quick bit of maths. If you have three salaried people working for you and your wages account for £90k, that's an average salary of £30k. If you take on an "intern" for nothing the average salary has just dropped to £22.5k and the company is effectively making money without the new person even lifting a finger because, intern or not, you now have four people working for you for the same amount of money. If you paid the intern £22.5k the average salary becomes £28k, you're still seeing an overall drop in overheads of £2k per person per year, but with more capacity. In other words, yes a company can afford to pay "law firm/banking salaries" if it has a decent business plan)

Maths aside, let's look at four reasons why the design industry not only can afford to pay decent salaries, but must:

Firstly, if you want a graduate workforce you have to be prepared to pay graduate salaries. Otherwise let's stop the pretence and go back to recruiting apprentices straight from school (something that is actually happening under the Creative Apprenticeships scheme). If the industry is collectively saying "we have no need of a graduate workforce" then a) it should say so and b) it should stop employing them. The "oversupply" would soon stop.

Secondly, the design industry represents a big chunk of the third largest contributor to the UK economy. Yet it pays its employees peanuts and has no consistent career development programme. This is shameful.

Thirdly, if a company has a need of a new member of staff it needs to factor the salary in to its business plan. Basing your business strategy on free labour is idiotic and will lead to failure because it lacks the key word: strategy.

But a business that pays a decent salary to its staff will know what it needs to make in order to pay those staff. And that will lead to a proper approach to getting business.
It's basic accountancy. If you have need for staff, it's called a vacancy. If you have a vacancy but can't afford to pay someone, you have a problem with your business plan and you will soon go under because you cannot afford to fulfil your orders except by using free labour - but that is effectively you cutting your prices (or worse - raising your margins which just adds to the ethical issues because you're now making more money but paying some people nothing), and before long that will lead to more and more pressure to take on cheaper work, and to take on cheaper labour. It's a deadly spiral.

Pretending otherwise and taking people on to work for nothing in return for "a great opportunity" is like ignoring the red letters from the credit card company. You're basing your whole business on a financial slight of hand and lying at the same time.

Fourthly, the design industry cannot afford to value its own staff so cheaply if in turn it wants potential clients to value what it can do for them. The Design Council has been launching partnerships recently to try to get the message about design's potential contribution to a wider audience. One of the big complaints from design companies is that people aren't prepared to pay decent money for design. Well, duh, let's look at our own activities shall we? Pot, meet kettle.

You do not attract the best graduates with crappy salaries and crappy jobs, or promises of potential fame and fortune. You attract the best talent with decent pay, decent training and decent career advancement.
Why is that so difficult to understand?

[Jonathan]

I should learn not to rant at 1.40am... ;-)

But seriously - a day without an intern and the design industry would crumble. We have to get our house in order before we can expect clients to take us seriously.
You can't value design if you don't value the people who do it.

[Dan]

So ultimately I absolutely agree with the longer-term, overriding point you make that education is needed to attribute greater value to design. This will then solve this entire issue, so that agencies can afford to pay grads and juniors as well as other industries, as soon as they are paid the same sort of day rates that accountants can command.

A few other points:

1) "It's *not* a supply and demand issue." - when there is an abundance of a supply of design/creative grads versus the number of positions available in creative organisations, salaries become lower. Sadly it does reduce it to a grad to a commodity but it absolutely applies here. I think there are only 6-8 graduate positions in most very large ad agencies, versus 300-600 positions for a very large consulting firm/bank/accountancy firm (perhaps fewer for both these days), and so there are far more candidates per position chasing the creative roles.

2) "Comparing it to Next is not a WTF - it's a sound argument." - my point about comparing it to Next is that in my opinion, I think a grad will prefer to be helping to create/produce/manage a brilliant international ad campaign for Honda versus working out how many brown brogues to stock in shops over the summer season (facetious, I know, but you get my point, particularly since the number of design roles at Next will be very very few indeed, compared to how many tech, buyer, merch roles they offer). Similarly, this is why, say, actuaries get paid very well: not to offend actuaries, but that role will appeal to only very particular type of individual... It's personal opinion, but I would be prepared to take lower pay for something (arguably) far more exciting and interesting, particularly given that it is a fact the revenues of creative agencies are far, far lower than companies in other industries.

3) "Basing your business strategy on free labour is idiotic and will lead to failure because it lacks the key word: strategy." I agree with that. But as a company - maybe not W+K, but a small creative company desperately struggling to turn a profit in this climate - if a new grad came to you who is prepared to work for free/next-to-nothing, it will be very difficult indeed to turn down. This comes back to the original point that W+K are in fact being very generous offering £1k/month for an internship at a great agency, in the midst of a massive recession.

[Anna]

I just applied to Platform and am pretty happy about the £1000 they are offering. The last internship I had paid 350euros a month plus a borrowed bike. I freelanced for them after this and jumped straight to 150euros a day. When I was interning I could take my time with everything I was doing which was great to learn more but when I started to freelance I had to be on the ball.

I don't really mind about the pay, the experience is what matters in these positions. Of course it would be great to be paid more but you can live off £1000 in London if you really need to. (I hope :/)

[Masum Khan]

I am now about to post this article and the amazing comments on all the University of the Arts message boards.

Let's see what the majority of students think about this. :D

[tkm]

Hi guys,

This is a really interesting discussion and I somewhat lost my way. We've just launched a website (http://www.freelancestudents.co.uk) aimed at getting freelance jobs for students and recent grads and this includes design jobs. There are a few creative jobs on the board right now. There's also a blog so we'd love to see commentary like this in the future! Please shout if you've got any feedback. Good luck with the job hunting!