Creatives can feel left behind when it comes to moving forward in their careers. They might be surprised how much they can learn from cartoon space travelers.

Research from the Content Marketing Institute has long confirmed what I’ve experienced anecdotally for years: Most bosses have no clue how to help creatives navigate career progression. If you’ve worked in marketing as a writer, graphic designer, or even a programmer, you probably had a manager who didn’t know how to help you take the next steps.

To be sure, if you aspire to management, including becoming a CMO or CEO, you have a well-trodden career path ahead of you. But if you simply want to write, design, promote, analyze, or build anything in marketing, things can feel opaque. Sometimes, it seems that the best you can hope for is getting “Senior” added to the front of your job description and a generic 3% raise every so often.

A rising tide of cynicism begins creeping up the back of your neck, and that bugs you.

You show up for work, complete your assignments, and go home at the end of the day. You do what you’re asked to do but wish you could do more. To top it off, you might deal with the “Sunday Scaries” on a regular basis because your department doesn’t have any well-defined processes, long-term strategy, or clear leadership oversight.

Your bosses also don’t provide you any avenues to contribute ideas beyond your immediate projects. You have big ideas about workflows, projects, strategy, measurement, success, and more. You want your work to mean something! Unfortunately, you don’t know what to do next, and, despite asking for help every other month, your manager doesn’t know what to do with you. It seems like your career might be stagnating.

It’s time for you to think like a Starfleet ensign.

In the world of Star Trek, an ensign is the lowest ranking officer. They are assigned the grunt roles, rudimentary tasks, and thankless jobs. Like you, they might be smart, talented, and educated, but they never get the fun or glamorous assignments – and they also don’t have a clear path to advancement. And like you, they embrace their roles while also looking for every opportunity to improve their skills, pursue success, and work creatively.

Most Star Trek shows follow the activities of the senior staff. Viewers watch captains and commanders make the big decisions and deliver orders to the ensigns. You rarely see the ensigns complete their tasks, unless one of the senior staff occasionally decides to join them and get their hands dirty.

While it’s often alluded to the fact that these leaders used to be order-following ensigns themselves, it’s usually not explained exactly how they rose through the ranks. As a viewer, you typically valorize the big wigs and assume the work gets done because they’re good leaders.

But all that changed with Lower Decks.

Over the course of its five-season and 50-episode run, viewers followed the successes, failures, and assorted hijinks of four (and eventually five) ensigns serving on the U.S.S. Cerritos. The show often reveled in the conflicts between these younger staffers and the senior officers, complete with full episodes exploring the results of poor communication, unclear objectives, and muddled strategies.

Does that sound familiar to you?

As a Star Trek fan, I immediately fell in love with the show’s appreciation for both deep canon lore and the overarching Starfleet ethos of putting the needs of the many over the needs of the few (or the one). As a people manager, I slowly realized that the show provided deep insights into how people and their careers deserve to be treated.

Each main character is an avatar for the five types of creatives I’ve worked with in my marketing career.

• Brad Boimler – The Go-Getter
• Beckett Mariner – The Rebel
• D’Vana Tendi – The Optimist
• Sam Rutherford – The Worker
• T’Lyn – The Doubter

I’ve even been a couple of them myself. In every case, we needed help moving forward in our respective paths, and each time, the responsibility rested with the creative (especially when we had a terrible manager).

I believe Star Trek can help you take charge of your career.

This is especially true when you’re a creative type who doesn’t aspire to senior leadership (or even if you do). In this series, I will introduce you to the main characters of Lower Decks. Using the lenses of “Character,” “Challenge,” “Choice,” and “Change,” I will provide you specific insights into how they learned how to advocate for themselves, their teams, and their careers. As befits the show, some of these lessons will be humorous on the surface, but underneath, I hope you find some essential truths about how you can succeed as a creative marketing professional.

The goal? To show creative marketing professionals that it is possible to advance in your career and to find work that really matters. Sometimes, you can achieve this without an active manager supporting you, but sometimes, you need to change how you interact with managers to get what you need from them. Each of our five ensigns will provide different ways you can approach your career without getting down on yourself so that you can then find joy in your creative work.

Header image courtesy of StarTrek.com