Being a creative marketing professional who actually gets to create is harder than you think, especially when it comes to moving your career forward. Not all of us want to be managers or executives, but we all want to thrive in our chosen field. Throughout this series, “Career Advancement Lessons from Star Trek: Lower Decks,” I want to help writers, designers, developers, and other practitioners learn how to speak up for themselves and their craft. Our goal? To do remarkable work worthy of respect and recognition in the workplace.

The Character:

“I would kill to work on the deflector dish. Most of my day is spent repairing food replicators.” (“Second Contact” – Lower Decks Season 1, Episode 1)

Ensign Sam Rutherford is your classic hard worker. He’s the guy who shows up and does his job without asking too many questions. He certainly excels at his job – there’s a reason he keeps getting assigned to the top projects – but he does that work without much ego. Yes, he’s proud of his work, but he won’t toot his own horn in any way. It’s not his style or personality. It’s not why he does the work.

So, why does he work so hard? Because he likes it. The only feedback he wants or needs comes from the people he respects for their similar appreciation for hard work, no matter their rank, title, or position. It’s why he gets along with his best friends: In their own way, they all love their work and want to be succeed, even if they approach it from different directions. It’s also why he gets along well with Chief Engineer Andy Billups and Security Chief Shax, both hard-working senior officers who never pursued promotions on more renowned starships because they are happy doing important “Second Contact” work on the USS Cerritos.

It helps that Ensign Rutherford has powerful internal drive to be the best he can be, and he doesn’t need much external motivation. In his eyes, doing a great job is its own reward, and it’s why he actively exceeds expectations with every possible project. He goes above and beyond because it’s the right thing to do. More importantly, he wants to do a better job with each and every project, as he’s the only person he’s competing against.

Many creatives in marketing are like Rutherford. They love their work with all of its tasks and trials, and they actively avoid attention. Promotions don’t interest them because they know that moving up the corporate ladder can mean going to lots of meetings instead of honing their craft. Sure, the money might sound good, but doing the work is more important than talking about it.

The Challenge:

When you’re truly internally motivated, it can be difficult to realize that you might need an external challenge. If you don’t need promotions, raises, or recognition to feel better about your work, your bosses might not even have any levers to encourage a change they might think you need. You’re doing wonderful work, your mentor praises you, and your friends support you. What else is there in life?

This is exactly where Ensign Rutherford found himself for the first four seasons of Lower Decks. His boss loved the quality and quantity of his work, offered some special projects, and generally supported him. He regularly got to team up with his best friend – Ensign Tendi – on some choice collaborations between the Engineering and Science divisions. Mariner and Boimler were constantly impressed by his creative thinking and cool-under-pressure demeanor.

In short, he was a model engineer who simply enjoyed doing good work – until he came face-to-face with his older competitive self, someone he thought he’d left behind. Without getting too in the weeds of the plot, Rutherford had to come to grips with the fact that he’d made some poor choices early in his career. While he’d worked to atone for them, he still had to contend with those consequences.

I suspect most creatives working in marketing have significant Rutherford tendencies. We all like doing good work because creating makes us happy and fulfilled. We got into marketing because it pays the bills a bit better than being a cliched starving artist, and we don’t really worry about climbing the corporate ladder. But at some point, we will have to reckon with the long-term effects of that decision because staying in one place can often lead to creative stagnation.

The Choice:

Rutherford eventually had to decide what promotion and advancement meant to him and what it represented. At one point in the show, we learn that he had been offered a promotion before, but he turned it down because he thought it would separate him from his friends. It was only when they earned a new rank that he chose a promotion, too. He realized that his good work had value because of who he worked with, not just because he did it.

His boss also helped him recognize that promotions also could mean better, deeper, and more meaningful work. Ensigns simply didn’t get challenging assignments because they hadn’t proved their worth or acumen. A promotion meant that senior officers recognized that Rutherford was a proven and capable engineer who deserved bigger challenges. He could be trusted to do more than successfully complete grunt work (as much as he enjoyed getting his hands dirty) – he could handle extended projects across departments with overlapping timelines.

This is the question that creatives in marketing must face: What kind of work do you want to do? Because you can build a solid career doing wonderful work, whether for a company or as a freelancer. You can gather all sorts of experience with copy, design, UX, and more on your path to becoming a trusted expert or specialist. But this still involves being handed projects by bosses, agencies, and companies who are making the big-picture decisions. And there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with such a career – but it is a choice.

If you ever want to step into a place where you can make a larger impact with that expertise, you will have to pursue some sort of promotion. No, that doesn’t automatically mean sitting in meetings and not doing work, but it does mean going to meetings where people decide how the work gets done. If you’re like most creatives I’ve met in my life, then you’ve probably groused to your coworkers about process, systems, and strategy. Sometimes, the only way to get invited to those discussions is with a better job title.

The Chance:

For Rutherford, a promotion meant that he got to keep working with his friends and that he would get assigned more meaningful work. He still got to be a hard worker, but his hard work was recognized and appreciated. That is a good thing! Yes, he was still internally motivated to do good work, but he also got better work that challenged him in new and interesting ways. And I have a feeling that, had the show kept going for more than five seasons, Rutherford would have to make the hard decision on whether or not to leave the USS Cerritos to become the Chief Engineer on another ship.

You will someday have to make a similar choice in your career, especially if you think you aren’t a manager type. You like the work you’re doing, people trust you for certain tasks, and you’re building up a strong portfolio. You might even be thinking about moving to a different company because the pay is better. All of that is very good. But with those improvements in doing the work comes experience in how it gets done. You move from focusing on in-the-moment tactics to thinking about long-term strategy.

Like Rutherford, you will have to take a chance on yourself. You will have to trust yourself, your skills, and your principles. You are a hard worker who wants to good work – great work, even! Sometimes, that means putting yourself in the place where you can decide what that work looks like (or at least show your boss that you have the people skills required to do more than technical work). Sometimes, career advancement literally means advancing your career, not because you want more power, rank, money, or responsibility, but because you want to influence the quality of the work for yourself and for others.

Image courtesy of StarTrek.com.