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Guest Blog: A Crafting Hobby That Might Score You a Raise at Work

Posted by DivineCaroline on September 18th, 2009 at 08:58am

By: Jennifer Barlow for DivineCaroline.com

It may surprise you that a fun, personal hobby, like Digital Scrapbooking, could actually help strengthen your career, but I know from first-hand experience that it can!

Consider it for a second. Do you have a career where you EVER make any type of flyers, handouts, or work with digital photos? If so, you most certainly could benefit at the workplace by becoming a Digital Scrapbooker!

I can actually vouch for this theory, as I have experienced it to be true first-hand at my 9-5 job. I started within a customer service role: answering phones, filing, faxing, and placing orders; but I wasn’t very happy. I was good at what I did, but I wasn’t passionate about it at all. I wanted to stand out and be a little more creative at my workplace. I decided to take the turn towards that creative path when, one day, I was instructed to outsource the project of completing our product’s visual pricelists. These pricelists were a basic list of thumbnail pictures of all the items we sold and their prices listed beneath. It seemed like a simple project within PowerPoint, but we were honestly paying “an arm and leg” for this outsourced company to complete it for us! I decided at that moment that I would just give the project a shot and just do it myself. Thankfully, it was a success, and my boss was ecstatic!

My boss began asking me to take on new challenges and create even more, but things became way too complicated for PowerPoint. Because I was familiar with Digital Scrapbooking and Photoshop Elements, I knew we needed to get Elements to complete the projects he wanted me to do. Elements was only $100 and would save a lot of money in the long run by doing these projects in-house, rather than outsourcing … so the office invested in Photoshop Elements!

I was then in charge of not only making our product’s order forms, but flyers, handouts, and eventually, even our company catalogs! I began using my knowledge from Digital Scrapbooking to resize and fix product photos to email at Web-quality to retailers and customers, and increased the resolution to print-quality for our Press Contacts. Because I was familiar with Photoshop Elements and because I understood Digital Scrapbooking, I was able to lighten/darken photos, correct image blemishes, color-correct, add detail like text (with our contact number and address), and insert our logos onto images to create “branding.” I helped create tradeshow collage posters and was able to design and create professional hand outs because I was familiar with layers and layouts as an avid Digital Scrapbooker! It was truly incredible!

Finish reading the entire article at DivineCaroline.com!