Fashion Careers: Matching Your Abilities and Personality with Careers in the Fashion Industry- Encajando Tus Habilidades y Persosnalidad Con Las Carreras Que La Industria De La Moda Tiene Para Ofrecer

ENG. Going into the fashion industry is like entering a whole new world, it's diverse and varied and has all kinds of different jobs to offer! There are various careers and all of them require different types of personalities. Personal characteristics play an equally important role in your professional success as your education. For that reason, you need to have clarity of which aspect of Fashion you like, and if your personality, abilities and talents can match it. This is a thought process you should undertake before choosing your career because not all personalities suit all the jobs. Working in the fashion industry is not all glamour, it is actually a very demanding industry; you will have to work very long hours and extremely hard. Therefore, you have to be very careful in which career you choose because not every individual has the right personality for all the careers and these characteristics are hard to acquire under pressure in the constant fast-changing world of the fashion industry. And let's face it, you don’t want to end up hating your job.

So how do you know which career or area of the industry is better for you or more suitable to your personality and knowledge?

Based on research and information about friends who actually work in the industry and love their jobs, I am going to show you what the main personal characteristics an individual should have to be successful in fashion:

Fashion Designers

If you want to be a fashion designer you have to be Creative to be able to launch trends and different styles every season. This is definitely the most important characteristic a designer should have and it is something that has to come out naturally, since it is something extremely hard to acquire over time. Along with creativity a designer needs to be Curious all the time, because it's from this curiosity that he or she can get inspired.

To be a designer you  need to know how to multitask, to be able to work in different things at the same time and to know how to quickly respond to problems and improvise, because fashion is a fast-paced industry and if something goes wrong you cannot become paralyzed.

Visual Merchandiser

If you want to be a Visual Merchandiser apart from being creative you will definitely have to be FLEXIBILE.  You should be flexible to travel since most of the time you will be on the road working on the stores located in different parts of a city or the world. You should have the flexibility to change your vision and create a new one right away, if the initial idea for the window display is not working due to problems of space. The visual merchandiser needs to be very social since you will meet tons of people on the job as you train and teach the staff, who could come from different cities and sometimes different countries. Finally, you need to be active and driven because being a visual merchandiser also involves a lot of manual and hands-on work.

Sales/Commercial

Charisma, Charisma, Charisma, in this job your clients have to like you, love you and adore you in order for them to want to do business with you. Also, as a sales manager you have to be very persuasive and convincing, you really need to know how to talk to your clients. You need to like numbers and you need to be resourceful to find creative ways to meet your financial goals. Also here you need to have flexibility to travel to visit your clients, therefore you have to like to travel a lot.

Country Manager

If you want to manage a fashion boutique, or several in a whole country you need to have people skills and you need to like working with people. If you decide to go for this career you will be dealing with people on a daily basis not only with problems directly connected to the business but also on a personal level.  So it is fundamental to know how to deal with people with different personalities and that you are accessible so that your employees can feel confident to come to you. As a friend of mine said “nowhere is it written you have to be evil to work in the real fashion industry… on the contrary you have to be a people person to be successful”.

Also, as  a country manager you need to be very structured, focused and organized, so you can coordinate the business and also be able to deal with the different problems that can emerge at anytime at the stores.

Product Development Manager or Fashion Coordinators

Organization is the key here. If  you are an organized person that likes putting things in order definitely take a look at this career. A product developer helps coordinate and organize everything the designer envisions. They not only need to have great knowledge and sensibility of the product but they need to be precise in everything they do. Great communication skills are also a requirement here because most of the time they are the interlocutor between production and the designers.

PR Managers

Again communication skills and interpersonal relationships play a great role. If you want to work as a PR manager it is important that you have great charisma and that you can communicate correctly in spoken and written form. A PR manager needs to relate with others in an excellent manner because he or she is responsible for the images of people or companies. Also for this career you need to be able to think outside the box!

Fashion Merchandiser (Apparel or Retail)

A fashion merchandiser has to be a very analytical person. If you are interested in this career you need to be a person that analyzes everything from numbers to your current relationships. A fashion merchandiser also needs to be a multitasking person. She or he needs to be able to deal with the pressure of managing several lines and collections at the same time and execute them in a timely manner. And here again communication skills play a great role since you need to be able to relate with completely different people such as: creative ones, business ones and the final consumer. Therefore you need to be a people person too.

These are not the only personal characteristics needed to do the jobs mentioned above, but I definitely consider some of the most important ones you need to have to do these jobs succesfully.  I hope this information can be helpful as you choose the career path that suits you the best. I still know that when you are in the first step of choosing a career it is not so easy to understand 100% what you actually do in each job. So how about if we meet here next month and start to explore the different careers in the fashion industry in detail?