Task 5: Job Roles

Art Director
Art directors need different professional and personal attributes to allow them to carry out their duties and to complete the wider responsibilities of their role.

P4: Understand The Behaviours, Skills and Attributes Necessary Within The Advertising Industry
The skills that an art director needs include:

• Good Communication Skills
• This is so that they can easily get their points across to who they need to speak to and how they translate things that they say to paper.
• Creative Skills
• They need these to have a vision of work that they want to do and to be able to achieve the goal.
• They also need this to fulfil their job in ensuring a high standard of visual execution across all media and campaigns.
• Time Management
• As a director, one would need to manage their time properly so that they can get everyone doing their job and put it all together by their deadline.
• Leadership Skills
• They need to be able to know where everyone should be and what stage of their job they are up to so that they can get the next thing that needs to be done ready.
• This also gives them a sense of ownership knowing that if the employees do not do a good job, the art director has to take blame for not keeping on track with them.

Behaviours that an Art director needs include:

• Self Confidence
• To be successful in a creative agency, you need to believe in yourself. An Art Director needs to make sure that they are confident in every project that they work on, and every assignment they complete.
• The Ability to Learn
• An Art Director can learn a lot from their supervisor and need to have curiosity and not be afraid to ask questions in order to learn and become more experienced.
• Stress Resistant
• A lot of pressure is put on an Art Director to work longer and faster to meet deadlines as more work load is piled on them so they need to be good at dealing with stress.
• Ability To Think Outside The Box
• An Art Director needs to try their best to create unique, successful projects in order to distinguish themselves from the rest.
• Excellent Communication
• An Art Director needs to have good communication in order to be successful at a creative agency. This means they should always be seeking to build relationships with clients, co-workers, superiors, and everyone else that is of concern to them. An outgoing and confident personality generally thrive in agencies, because of their need for social interaction.
• Strategic Thinking
• Besides instinct and intuition, excellent art directors think strategically. They draw creative briefs in order to achieve the campaign objectives.

Attributes that an Art Director needs include:

• Resilience
• An Art Director needs to have the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness in order to complete there job role.
• Focus
• Every professional needs focus, but few need it as much as an Art Director. They always have to focus on the big picture. They have to keep the project headed in one direction.
• Courage
• An Art Director needs to be courageous and not be afraid to fail. If they are afraid, they may come up with timid, dull and non-imaginative work that nobody’s going to like.
• Punctuality and Efficiency
• Deadlines are very important so an Art Director needs to keep on schedule as they should work as quickly and effectively as they can in a short time frame.

M2: Explain How Personal Behaviours An Attributes Affect Career Development Opportunities Within The Media Industry

There are many different behaviours and attributes that can affect career development opportunities when being an Art Director. This even includes how much ambition they may have to get to different stages of their career and how far they want to actually go with their career.

If someone has got good communication skills and is happy to talk to new people and they have good networking skills, this could really help how far their career goes as it means that people will be able to vouch for the person as a good person or worker as they are known on a personal level and they create a bond by talking to the person.

If someone is creative as a person as well as in their career, they can be noticed by many different people and maybe asked to do different things that may give them different opportunities in their career.

When someone has good leadership skills, they are easily able to go far as they can show the skills of being a leader and keeping everyone's spirits up and making sure people are doing all the work that is allocated to them. This also means that in like they know what is going on and they are able to handle heavy workloads, therefore, they would be a great worker in a business aspect.

Using these skills, they could go to higher jobs or be given different tasks. This could include going from being an arts director for a small company to a big company, being able to go from being a director of the billboard campaign to billboard and TV campaign or even being the director of the whole campaign in itself being given the client brief straight from the client.

If an art director has good organisation skills, it will help them in many ways which can include how well production goes, how long it takes, who is working where and on what etc. They are able to have this hand in hand with leadership skills so that swell as being an organised person, they can help everyone else to be organised and make sure everything runs smoothly.

There are many opportunities out there at the moment that people could take up to slowly become an art director. These smaller opportunities would give people that take them up the skills that they would need to become an art director, even if it is only one of them such as gaining better organisation skills. By gaining any of these skills in a smaller job, they would be succeeding towards the goal of being an art director. These smaller jobs include being an artist, graphic designer, photographer or other creative jobs in that industry.

The current job roles available are an Art Director, based in Central London. The job role highlights that the ideal candidate must have experience with working in a team and an excellent portfolio of previous work. This shows how valuable the attributes and behaviours previously mentioned are needed they are as they will help you be able to make your way up to become an Art Director. Working in a team and being able to manage them allows candidates to handle heavy workloads and delegate roles amongst a team.

Another job role available is a Art Director in South East London who is required to work within the interior design advertising market. The experience that is needed is to be at a director level with directorship experience and confident to meet clients face to face whenever needed. What you would need from the attributes that I spoke about before are leadership skills and have confidence and organisation skills.