From Finland to The Netherlands for a Creative Agency life by IB student

Last winter I had a chance to do my traineeship with a job offer afterwards in a leading creative agency in Rotterdam. It was a long process to find internship or traineeship as my focus was specifically on the Netherlands due to my very memorable exchange in Utrecht the year before. My exchange year helped me to explore different countries in Europe and decide which one is closer to my heart. Thanks to LinkedIn and other famous recruiting platforms I could focus my applications on open positions only in The Netherland. That is how I got in DPDK Creative agency and moved to Rotterdam.

My position was called Project Manager which is directly connected to IB program and all the business knowledge you get during your studies as it is a position which includes soft skills together with your digital hard skills. The Project Manager is mostly responsible for strategy, planning and successful delivery of the project which can be 1 month or several years. In our agency we provide all kinds of creative services, such as: Brand Strategy, Identity, Design Systems, Websites, Marketing Strategy, Copywriting, SEO etc. My role was mostly leading Brand and Marketing projects. From the start my manager assigned clients and full projects for me, so even when I was a Trainee, my responsibilities were not much different from a full time PM, thus it helped to boost my skill extremely fast and integrate in the process straight with practice. It suited me the best as I like fast-moving work and different tasks daily. My minimum package of responsibilities were communications between teams, stakeholders, management, upsell if possible and follow all the administrative routine. I had great opportunities to work with big clients like Heineken, Optiver, Ortec etc. and deliver amazing works for them which went live too. And of course, I am happy to continue working with DPDK agency and my lovely colleagues-friends who I have met here.

Overall, it was interesting to see how agencies are doing their business and organizing creative work, it seemed that we all were trying to find the perfect balance between Creative Freedom and Structured tasks. I had never thought before that you need sometimes to put frames on creativity and do creative work within the limitations of client’s budget. How to estimate Creative Work? That is a whole new art.

Author: IB student