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The Truth About Entry-Level Jobs in Fashion

Graduate employment rates within the creative industries are rising in the U.S. and Europe, but fashion’s newest generation of talent faces a rapidly changing career landscape — with greater challenges and opportunities than ever before.
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By
  • BoF Team

Learn how to differentiate yourself in fashion's extremely competitive job market by taking BoF’s online course: Build Your Dream Career.

LONDON, United Kingdom — With a job market that is notoriously competitive and cutthroat, finding your first job in the fashion industry can be a daunting prospect. However, despite fashion's reputation for hauteur and the horror stories of near-impossible odds stacked against securing paid employment, career opportunities in fashion design and the creative industries are growing for graduates.

The British Government’s Creative Industries Report stated that the EU workforce in creative industries increased by 14.5 percent and the UK by 15.6 percent in 2016, which was a respective 47 percent and 57 percent increase between 2012 and 2016. Across the Atlantic, the US is expecting similar progress, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting a 3 percent employment growth rate for designers in the US from 2016 to 2026. What’s more, just last year when BoF independently surveyed over 10,000 students in 2017, the number of students who secured employment within 12 months of graduation increased by more than 5 percent over 3 years.

However, while graduate employment rates are only modestly rising, the industry’s employment landscape is rapidly changing. This is primarily due to the effects of industry-wide digital disruption and the need to appeal to this new demographic of talent, which has its owns workplace preferences and career ambitions.

By 2020, millennials and Gen-Z demographic cohorts will account for the largest portion of the working population and their preferences are already permeating the work place. Millennials place a far greater emphasis on career development opportunities than previous generations, according to BoF’s survey.

In order to attract and retain the best talent, leading companies in fashion have sought to cater to self-driven career development and autonomous decision making by offering more flexibility to their employees. This has resulted in many key functions within the industry following less and less linear career paths.

Job functionalities now often bleed into one another and this is especially true at a junior level. Today, entry level roles and responsibilities call for far greater collaboration across functions than ever before. While this positively allows for more exposure to a broader range of jobs and career growth, it also increases stress as the skill sets required to be a success grows broader and broader.

For now, however, many graduates retain an ace up their sleeve. Although the professional services firm Deloitte reports that 41 percent of companies have either fully implemented or partially adopted cognitive and AI technologies within their workforce, claims that human employees will be replaced by robots and god-like algorithms imminently are overstated — and ignore the leaps in robotic technology and data management necessary.

But the adoption of new digital technologies has now become crucial to commercial success in all but the rarest of cases. The recent emergence into the work force of digital natives — those born in the late 1990s following the mass adoption of technology — is only speeding up this process, as those with digital talent advance fast, bringing new skill sets to the table and fulfilling novel needs as they emerge.

Learn how to differentiate yourself in an extremely competitive market by taking BoF’s online course: Build Your Dream Career, and check out the most exciting entry level opportunities available on BoF Careers below.

Learn how to differentiate yourself in an extremely competitive market by taking BoF’s online course: Build Your Dream Career, and check out the most exciting entry level opportunities available on BoF Careers below.

Graphic Designer, Calvin Klein — Amsterdam, Netherlands

Commercial Assistant, Comme des Garçons — New York, United States

Copywriter/ VIP Assistant, Vestiaire Collective — Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Assistant Buyer, Women's Designer RTW, Barneys New York — New York, United States

Supply Chain Business Analyst, Gucci — Florence, Italy

Assistant Designer Women's Knits, Tommy Hilfiger — New York, United States

Junior Designer, EPO Fashion Group — Guangzhou, China

Jewellery Store Stylist, The RealReal — Los Angeles, United States

Wholesale Operations Analyst, Coach — London, United Kingdom

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