Unfortunately it's the chicken-or-egg syndrome. Most entrants are in the difficult position where they don't have enough experience to get into the market but the only way to get experience, is to be in the market!
Our advice for you is to focus on what you as a new entrant to the digital world of a web agency believe is your strength. So, do you want to be a great coder, a great designer or a great Flash person? We find far too many people in this industry who describe themselves as self-professed "jack of all trades", which always tends to give one a false sense of importance. In this increasingly competitive environment, there is no more room for mediocre work... therefore if your work is not outstanding, then you are simply not worth employing.
At Mnemonic, great design is a lifestyle. It's a feel-it-in-your-heart discipline that you either have or you don't. It's always easy to copy someone else's design, but it will always be someone else's, and you will never feel the sense of accomplishment and fulfillment by creating something from nothing - which is ultimately what this "calling" is all about.
It is important to remember that Photoshop does not make a good designer - if you are a mediocre designer to begin with then all that a knowledge of the Photoshop programme will do is enable you to produce a mediocre design - very well. The same goes for Flash and many other software programmes.
The industry is in dire need of solid, brilliant people, full stop. Whatever their expertise. But, we also don't believe a person should be dictated to by the needs of an industry. You have to love whatever you are doing, you have to believe in your own capability so much that a potential employer would be a fool to let you walk out the door.
"And the portfolio?", job applicants always ask. Your portfolio is only ever the first step to getting an interview, but ultimately it says more about you as a person than you yourself can. It needs to be representative of your ability to think, your attention to detail, and then your desire to do great work. It doesn't matter what industry sector the work fits into. If you had a portfolio of web sites that were absolutely brilliant in their thinking, their design and their function, then that would say more than seeing a whole heap of corporate sector boxes being ticked off.
Our suggestion is that as a potential employee, you take a long hard think about what would make you get up in the morning and really want go to work, and then do everything possible to be great at it. If it's design then shut down your computer for a week and use a note pad and pencil to generate designs and ideas -- if you can't do this then no amount of Photoshop skill is going to make you a designer. If you want to be a coder then take a screen shot of a site that you think is really great, fire up Fireworks and Dreamweaver and re-code the site without looking at the original source code. When you've done this make sure it works on Mac and PC, IE 4,5,6 and Netscape 4,5,6 etc. ... ASP and Database integration is the next thing you'd want to learn. If you can master all this, then you'll be a valuable coder to any organisation.
So this is it! If all of this sounds a bit pedantic, it's because we've seen too many people coming for interviews with a long list of software programmes they can operate, and.... they wouldn't know a good design/idea if it hit them in the eye!
