Although there are a lot of jobs for interior designers, they have less to do with your degree than with the connection that you have. I learned this the hard way. When I first became interested in interior design jobs, I did what any a hard-working kid from a Jewish family in New York would have done – I studied my behind off. Granted, an interior design job was not the traditional career path in my family. My parents both looked at me sideways when I announced my intention to look for jobs in interior design. They wanted me to be a professional or an artist. I didn't have to make a lot of money, but I did have to do something with an intellectual bent to it. In their minds, interior design jobs did not fit the bill.
Nonetheless, when my parents saw that they could not talk me out of interior design careers, they became supportive. It turns out there is a lot more to interior design jobs than they had thought. An interior design job does not just involve decoration, it involves designing a space to make it more useful for people to live and work in.
I went to one of the best interior design schools in the country, and got great grades. Nevertheless, I was so busy studying that I did not make the connections that would be so important for interior design jobs. If you want to get an interior design job, you had better get to know a few architects, a promoter or two, and some icons of the art design world. Basically, there are a lot of different kinds of contacts that help you with interior design jobs, but you must have contacts.
Because I did not make contacts, I was limited in the interior design jobs that I could take. There were some entry level jobs open but none of them seemed very interesting. Nevertheless, I knew that I had to work. I immediately applied, and I got an interior design job at a large firm. It was not very interesting work – mostly we worked to redesign factories. Nevertheless, I was more wise about making contacts this time. In my interior design job, I met a lot of people who could help me advance my career. Now that I'm looking for other interior design jobs and thinking about quitting my current one, these contacts are proving invaluable.
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