Growing Your Career in DAM

I must start this post with an apology. Many of you in my network have sent me queries in the last year asking for career advice. What to do next. How to grow your career in DAM. In fact now that I look back, I received 42 messages on three different platforms, mostly from people I have never worked with directly and whose skills I am not familiar with. I failed to answer most of them. Mea Culpa. I apologize. My guilt, and a recent seminar, is what what led me to write this post.

Last month I gave a talk to the DAM Master's students at King's College about careers in DAM, which was a reprise of a session from the 2019 spring semester where course convener Professor Brian Kavanaugh invited me, Jing Wang, and Madi Weland Solomon to talk about our varied careers in DAM. Jing created a slide showing a DAM Career Development Ladder that mirrored the career growth path at her company, ICP. I've since expanded the slide into technical and broader MarTech roles.

Here's where it landed for the recent lecture at King's:

This slide alone provides a lot of reading; my goal was to give students a sense of what's involved in the many roles I've seen my clients (or myself!) in during my 26 years working in content management. I shared a few key thoughts with the students that in my neglect to answer career-query emails seemed ripe for sharing here on LinkedIn:

1) Know what to look for: it's not about the title. Jobs that involve DAM, and require DAM skills, often (in fact usually) don't have "digital asset management" or "DAM" in the title. So if you're looking for a job in DAM, you need to think about keywords like "librarian", "brand steward", "marketing manager", "change manager", or "MarTech business analyst". If you become a change manager or a business analyst, your job may involve looking at interactions between at DAM and related systems, or managing rollout and adoption of a creative operations program that includes a DAM. Digital asset management is often an element of a job, not just a job in and of itself.

2) Broaden your knowledge, but specialize. There's a diversity of focus areas within DAM that you can become an expert in: the technology itself, metadata and taxonomy, governance, training, communications & adoption, localization, product marketing, marketing technology stack architectures. I recommend you find a passion among these specializations and focus on that earlier in your career. Gain a high-level or peripheral knowledge of the other areas and you'll move up the ladder. So while I consider myself a DAM marketplace and technology expert, with a strong secondary skill in data orchestration, I wouldn't dare act as a project manager, or a change manager. I'm lousy at both. As technology becomes more multi-faceted and projects more specialized, we need to be, too.

3) Working for end-user organizations, a vendor, or a consulting firm are very different experiences. I could easily overlay three more layers on the roles above: end-user organizations, technology vendors, and consultancy or analyst firms. In these different flavors of companies, the roles above will feel very different. Many people start as a brand manager with an end user organization, learn about DAM and use a DAM system, and continue up the ladder to become a MarTech leader in a Fortune 500 company. Others start as a sales or marketing assistant with a DAM vendor and work their way up to owning and driving a product roadmap, or perhaps they leave that company to build a newer and better product. Others will start in an managed services role acting as a brand manager or system steward, and then grow into consulting, choosing to join a team at a large consulting firm or work as a specialized independent like I do. Some will move from an end-user organization to working for a vendor, after being that vendor's customer (and usually they'll end up making a lot more money).

4) Be patient and focus on you, as well as the job. You're not going to be a DAM product owner after being a librarian for a couple of years. You've got to slog it out. You've got to network within your company and figure out who to know, how to gracefully influence, and where the best areas are to grow. If you get bored with what you're doing (tired of tagging?!), propose what else you can do to help your company deliver on its bigger goals and initiatives. Soft skills matter more than ever, even in a virtual world. When I managed a team in my prior roles, I rarely had to advise my team members to beef up their skills or knowledge (or that would be the smaller part of the feedback). Rather, I often had to advise them on how to build better relationships, how to be empathetic, how to compel people to want to work with them, how to be more like-able.

5) Don't count on your company to grow your career. It's up to you. Though some companies are very good at providing career development, training, and growth paths to their employees, the vast majority I would argue are not. You'll need to invest your own time and money into your career growth. One King's student asked me what I did to grow my personal brand. It was pretty straightforward: when I was in my 20s and early 30s, I took vacation time to attend and go speak at conferences. I spent my own money to take classes that would build my knowledge. You have to invest in yourself.

There's no doubt more roles that involve DAM that I've not been able to fit on my slide. I want to continue to build on this post and expand on the slides for the students at King's, as well as the global DAM community. I'd welcome your comments, additions, or any additional thoughts to my post.

I'm tempted to end with the phrase "best of luck" to all as we grow our DAM careers in 2021. But I'd rather un-apologetically quote Ernest Hemingway: "you make your own luck."