Career Advancement Lessons from Star Trek: Lower Decks Recap

As a young creative professional working in marketing, you want your work to matter, but it feels like your career is stuck. It doesn’t help that, as an up-and-coming copywriter, designer, or coder, you often focus more on doing the work than getting your work seen by senior leaders.

Recent research from the Content Marketing Institute bears this out. You want to do remarkable work while earning recognition and advancing your career. While you don’t want your career to stagnate, you also don’t how to advocate for yourself effectively. You need to learn how to communicate your work clearly, especially if you ever want to get raises and promotions.

You can learn a lot from the cartoon space travelers on Star Trek: Lower Decks.

Ensigns are the lowest ranking officers in Star Trek. They do the everyday assignments, usually with no fanfare. In fact, you rarely see these characters actually doing work. Star Trek shows typically focus on the senior leaders who make the big decisions and get all the accolades. In fact, you rarely ever learn why or how people rise in rank. It just happens somehow.

Sounds a lot like your marketing job, doesn’t it?

That changed with Lower Decks. Throughout five seasons and 50 episodes, the show portrayed four (and eventually five) ensigns and all their wacky hijinks as they served on the U.S.S. Cerritos. A classic workplace comedy (but in space), most of the events tracked how these young officers did their jobs, with lots of time given to their friendships and how they navigated vague objectives, incoherent strategies, and infrequent communication.

That should also sound familiar to you.

However, I believe the smart, talented, and often silly main characters of this show can teach us lessons that could change your career. Each one represents a creative archetype I’ve worked with in my marketing career. By investigating their “Character,” “Challenge,” “Choice,” and “Change,” we can learn crucial clues for succeeding as a creative marketing professional.

As the characters of Star Trek: Lower Decks reveal, you can advance your career and do worthwhile work that matters. Sometimes, it’s about finding your own joy, while other times, it’s about advocating yourself and your skills. Ultimately, you need to learn how to trust your own judgment and communicate with your team and your boss. You can do all the amazing work possible, but if no one sees you, you’ll probably be an ensign forever.

Header image courtesy of Trek Central.