Throughout my career, I worked in several different agencies. Some of them were as small as 20 people. I joined one of them when we were about 30 people and left when the company counted just south of 150 peeps (5X). Some others were global consulting of 2000+

I’ve managed to boil down to 4 main points as to why you should think about joining an agency or a design studio.

1. Exposure:

This is definitely the first that comes to mind. Being in an agency or studio allows you to get exposed to several different industries, clients, projects, and teams without having to change company.

This will incredibly benefit your development. You will learn lots of different skills. From mastery of the craft through task repetition, public speaking through design-pitching for clients, and managing more junior people through project setup.

Those points are generally the main drivers of new grads who are yet not settled on a specific industry or company they would like to work for. For that specific segment of people, joining an agency or smaller studio might be a good decision. By doing so, they will not only leverage the learnings mentioned above, but they will also get the chance to deliver end-to-end projects sooner than in-house. This is mostly due to the way agencies work.

For each client project, you will have a senior/lead designer whose task will be to direct the design outputs. The time of said lead designer will probably be spread across different clients/projects. Hence, as a more junior practitioner, you will have the chance to learn by doing most of the work while also being guided by a more senior profile.

2. Fast-paced environment:

In the beginning, it will feel like you are always running. But I promise you it won’t stay that way. Once you started to understand the agency delivery process, things will start to go much more smoothly.

That said though, Agency is a much more fast-paced environment than in-house (excluding startup of course). Things tend to move fast since most of the client-side things have been worked out ahead of the agency engagement. Things like internal research, stakeholders approvals, budgeting, etc.

The downside of it is that because of that, delivery is indeed very fast. Clients pay top money to involve agencies. Hence, once they have engaged with the agency, they want things delivered soon.

On the one hand, even inside an agency, there are more long-term deliveries, which often adopt an Agile delivery methodology. You will be part of a cross-disciplinary team and you will engage with a client daily. Almost like a small army of freelancers that the client is “renting” long term.

On the other hand, agencies are well-known for pitching. To win projects, you first need to pitch for them. The more you pitch, the more you win. This is especially true for smaller studios that might yet not have an established pool of recurring clients. In this scenario, things move even faster and the usual time-span of a pitch can be anywhere between a couple of days to 2–3 weeks.

3. Downtimes:

Here is the flip side of the medal. Call it downtime. Call it being on the bench. Call it Learning & development time.

Either way, the concept is that agencies work within flows. During some times of the year, you will have more clients and more projects. You pitched a lot, you won a lot. Some other times instead you will have fewer things to do. This may be due to fewer pitches or opportunities as well as seasonality (in-house clients have budgets and at the start of each new financial year there will be much more money to go around for projects and new hires).

Generally, you can use this downtime to upskill yourself, work on a personal project (which benefits your company), or just simply take things slowly. I always try to suggest doing either one of the first 2.

• Although taking things slowly is not a bad thing either. Especially if it helps avoid burnouts down the line.
• Learning a new skill or a new platform could also be fun and super beneficial for your future career.
• Focusing on a passion/personal project tailored towards your business or your capability is like being an entrepreneur without the risks of jumping ship: creating a tiny startup inside the business and having more senior people reviewing it.

4. Peers:

This is relative. Meaning it depends on the agency or studio. But more often than not, you will end up joining a team of people who are passionate about the same discipline you are working on.

At times this could be hard to find in-house, especially if joining a company that has a relatively small design team or if you join a startup as a solo designer.

Peers as a benefit might sound weird to you but it is something I strongly suggest to not underestimate. Having people to talk to that understand your point of view is incredibly beneficial both professionally as well as mentally. Complaining about your client with peers by the coffee machine or the watercooler takes the steam off and helps cope with a hard week.

Remember that your peers contribute to the culture of a company and culture is one of the main drivers that retains people in a workplace.

https://twitter.com/lobellucci