Listed in no particular order:

1. In House has Advantages
In school, I never realized how many opportunities there are to work directly for a company rather than for an agency. Not all places are like Target (listen to podcast with Brian Edlefson for more on their design team), and value your work as a designer, but there are still some perks. I know I’m generalizing a lot here, especially as all employers are different, but I’ve found through my limited network that the starting pay is slightly better, and the hours are closer to 8-5 than that of an agency. You may only get to work for one client all day long, and in my case, just work on one project (their website), but that can be a great opportunity understand a brand, learn to work with corporate guidelines, and work in pushing those said guidelines as much as you can.

2. Know Who Should See the Work, and What to Show Them
I got lucky in that another designer gave me this advice from day one. A lot of my work had to be reviewed by committees. Knowing who can give solid constructive advice to narrow down choices before a committee views the work is necessary.

3. Freelance
If your company doesn’t allow you to do outside work for clients, just do design for yourself, design for a charity, anything other than your regular work. The fun, experimental projects you remember doing in college can still be done today, you just have to do them on your own time. It is worth it. You’ll remember why you got into this profession in the first place and show up at work remembering that you like to do this kind of work.

4. Make the Project More Difficult
Only doing work for one client leaving you in a rut? Take that regular production job and add something to it that gives you a reason to learn something new. Take this as your opportunity to learn that feature in Illustrator you’ve read about, how to use a new CSS feature in your web design, anything but just what you ‘have’ to do. Never stop learning.

5. Know When to Leave
This is the hardest lesson I learned at that job. Liking the work you’re doing and having coworkers you get along with sometimes isn’t enough. It isn’t always about pay or hours either. I knew there would be a lot of reasons I would regret leaving the opportunity I had, but I also knew that the position wasn’t going to grow with me creatively, and that was something I wasn’t willing to live with. The things I regretted leaving for I knew I could get over quicker than the feeling I would get by not taking that chance to learn more.