My expert was Sadrack Ondigui, a former marketing agent who has worked for fashion brands in both France and the United States, including H&M, Celine, Miaou and Harry Halim. The reason I chose Sadrack was because he would be familiar with employment not only in the U.S but also overseas, which would not only give perspective for an expansion outside the U.S but also further define the consensus on what employers seek from entry-level creatives, and how to best optimize the networking process to their interest.
Besides the technicalities of work visas and degrees, he said one of the biggest distinctions in working between two different countries is the work culture. There are cultures in other regions like the Middle East or South Asia where their perspective on time is very relaxed, usually arriving to meetings and finishing deadlines at or a little past the last minute, which can cause discrepancy and discord within a business. In Chinese work culture for example, it is considered rude to look your superior in the eyes, even though the exact opposite is true for western culture. Culture discrepancies can be problematic for work cohesion, and should be paid attention to, a detail that could prove to be an asset.
That goes into one of his bigger points about employers both here and overseas having a tendency to prioritize group cohesion and company loyalty. Many hiring managers can be happy to find a great employee but be forced to cut them off if they prove to hazardous to the environment of the great company as a whole, and this can be for both good and bad companies; a bad manager will be forced to fire a good employee just as easily as a good manager must fire a bad employee. Work culture is critical, so networking won’t only be about connecting bosses and potential workers, but also connecting workers with the workplace and the people within it.
The last concern Sadrack had was competition. He said plenty of platforms like LinkedIn, Behance and Dribble serve the same networking function for a lot of designers and creatives, and have already been doing it for a long time. Success for the business won’t only require expanding the customer base as far as possible but also finding some sort of gimmick that will differentiate us as much as possible, something to stand out of the crowd: exclusiveness to entry-level creatives, using technology to set-up and facilitate meetings, and using a lottery type system to incentivize commitment from participants are guaranteed to ensure success, he says. Big brands have little to no interest in entry-level creatives either, so there can’t be any expectations for huge wealth or immediate success. Prioritizing local contacts also depends on regions and locations, which comes with their own complexities.
A lot of valid concerns were raised in this interview, and a lot of perspective was gained. Moving forward with Upsurge will require intense considerations, understanding, and planning for these issues if it is to succeed.