Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as an advertising art director and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
An Advertising Art Director is responsible for designing the visual side of all the advertising operations for all brands of media including film, TV, print or web as well as producing art layouts through the use of art concepts.
The primary duties are keeping customers informed by reviewing illustrative material for presentation, accomplishing art department work through orientation, training, assignments and coaching employees, meeting the required architecture standards by following production, productivity, quality and customer service standards, identifying and implementing work process improvements, meeting the skill cost standards by monitoring expenses, implementing cost saving actions, formulating art concepts through thorough supervision of executing layout designs, selecting and securing illustrative material by expressing basic layout design concept.
Core Skills Required to be an Advertising Art Director
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
An advertising art director should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Listening Skills:
Listening Skills are a practical ability to accurately receive and interpret messages you receive during the communication process to ensure flow and accuracy are maintained.
An Advertising Art Director ought to have outstanding listening skills that lead to a better understanding at the workplace between the management and the staff, customer satisfaction in return yielding greater productivity with fewer mistakes and increased sharing of information in a more creative and innovative way.
Knowledge of Company Processes:
Knowledge of Company Processes is the in-depth understanding of a collection of related, structured activities that serve a particular goal for a group of customers or clients who are valuable to the enterprise.
An Advertising Art Director ought to maintain consistency across the daily processed while keeping a keen eye on the overall plan of the organization by ensuring the company processes are performed and followed.
Decision Making:
Decision Making is the art of making choices by identifying a decision, gathering information and assessing alternative resolutions before settling on one.
An Advertising Art Director cannot afford to make poor decisions, that's why he ought to develop a systematic approach to decision making that allows him to make every decision with skill, confidence, and wisdom producing a final choice of competence in the workplace.
Giving Feedback:
Giving Feedback is one of the most powerful tools to develop employees and improve performance through honest feedback of the work done best and areas that need improvement.
An Advertising Art Director should be skilled in giving out both praise and criticism in a wise way to occasionally show workers where they need to improve and providing them with an observer's insight into the progress of their performance.
Developing Others:
Developing others is an unremitting process that focuses on the broader, longer-term growth of individuals to nurture them to their potential and promote future development.
An Advertising Art Director needs to support, coach, positively impacts and effectively aid in developing talents of their staff by motivating them to become outstanding in their behavioral change and performance improvement that opens up development opportunities in the organization.
Creativity:
Creativity is the skill of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality through the ability to perceive the world in new ways, find hidden patterns, make connections between unrelated phenomena and generate solutions.
An Advertising Art Director should be able to think, then reproduce ideas and act on them to bring awareness of what was currently hidden and point to a new life that will progress the business to new heights.
Potential for Advancement:
The potential for Advancement is the ability to make something better by being more skillful, more efficient, and more useful to produce high-quality results.
An Advertising Art Director needs to invest in his employees by creating room for individual advancement that encourages stronger job performance because it positions the employees to demonstrate just how well they can perform their jobs through motivation and feedback that are critical to the employee performance.
Project and Goal Focus:
Project and Goal Focus is setting your mind and heart on things that matter and add value to your life against those things that add no value at all or of little value.
An Advertising Art Director ought to learn of early hiccups that may cause distraction and get to motivate the employees early enough to see the projects completed promptly and in good condition.
Process Improvement:
Process Improvement is the creation of new processes or improving the existing ones that will work and take your corporation to the next level.
An Advertising Art Director must maintain the continuous improvements in the workplace that are favorable to the current investors, potential investors, and stock owners while working with methods that can serve as a foundation for future business decisions causing a profitable growth.
Training others:
Training is the ability to expand the knowledge base by learning new truths that are useful in the workplace.
An Advertising Art Director needs to creatively schedule training for his employees in a focused manner that will allow the employee stay useful in the workplace and get new knowledge so that both the business and the worker not suffer from delays and work related stress.
Hard Skills Required to be an Advertising Art Director
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
An advertising art director should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.