The Blog

Here at THECUBE, we have a fantastic team behind us, making our centre the diverse and professional community that it is. We also have on board Russell Thomas – our intern at THECUBE.

We decided it would be good to get Russell’s thoughts on how to be innovative as a graduate and survive the ongoing recession. Read on to discover Russell’s thoughts on the subject…

For survival right now, creative skills are crucial. I think that my skills, compared to those of someone who has graduated from a corporate background, are much more useful, and allow for me to find and ultimately get more opportunities.

If we look at it firstly in terms of specific, personal skills, it makes more sense. Say if somebody graduates in Accounting, they’ll learn to be an accountant. Their skill is being good with numbers, however, anybody, in theory and practice to an extent can ‘do’ accounts – moreover, someone who is good with numbers is not necessarily invaluable. A calculator can do this. My skill is writing, being fastidious with grammar and spelling, and generally being adaptable (I’ll speak about adaptability in a bit) with what people want to say – taking someone’s voice and using it as a mouthpiece. Now, it isn’t as easy as using the linguistic calculator, a thesaurus. To write properly, to write for people, you need specific skills, and I have them. It isn’t as easily replacable as a person good with numbers.

In terms of general skills, I believe that adaptability is one of the most important. If you’re graduating – let’s extend the example – from an Accounting degree, that is what you are. There is nothing to fall back on. You have already set yourself a path and to stray from that path is to stray into something completely unknown, where your skills will be useless. It is a key that fits one, maybe a few doors. On the other hand, being an imaginative, creative person will work as a skeleton key to many doors. Being interested in many different things, being adaptable, is a quality that you’d like to think is only inherent in creative people. It doesn’t have to be that way, ‘corporate’ individuals should expand their horizons as well, but this is the way I work.

Because I haven’t set myself a profession to be ‘in’, like an accountant would have to do, I can go from writing a draft for a novel, to writing a business-minded white paper and the transition requires no additional training. I can write a poem one day and an ‘About us’ section for a fashion website the next. Seeing these opportunities is part of being interested and imaginative – envisaging where you could fit into any project. This in turn requires adaptability, and without this I think that people would be less successful. It works not just on this grand scale of what you want to do, but also with how you approach problems. Being creative means that you naturally have more ideas, more solutions.

It is not as black and white as this: I’m sure some accountants are adaptable and creative, but for the most part, we are split down the middle. I just don’t want to follow a set path. I don’t wear blinkers, I’m not reigned in. I do not see my future. In a corporate environment, you see your potential future everyday: your manager.