A Life of Enthusiasm

Speaking to Rachael Rainbow about her career, the word she uses most frequently is ‘enthusiasm’. It is something she values highly in both her colleagues and her clients. And with enthusiasm as her guide she’s found a satisfying job that has given her access to some of the worlds leading art and historical collections, as well as to some great people.

Rachael is the Production Director at Cogapp, a Brighton-based company that specialises in large-scale web and interactive digital projects. They work with leading museums and galleries, not-for-profit organisations and UK government departments, designing systems to creatively display their ‘data’ online or through the interactive installations. 

That ‘data’ might be the works of arts in the National Portrait Gallery, the artefacts of the British Museum, or just everything you need to know about the Parachute Regiment. Interesting people and diverse subjects are part of what Rachael loves about her job.

As production director she is in charge of the company’s user experience and production teams, overseeing all of the company’s projects and personally managing some of the bigger projects herself. She’s currently managing the website redevelopment for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Starting out

Web and interactive production was not a concept, let a lone a career choice two decades ago when Rachael was thinking about careers. Besides a certainty that she would enjoy organising things or people because of her “natural bossiness”, Rachael was motivated to go to university only by her conviction that she would have a fantastic time rather than by any vocational calling. Beyond university she had given little thought to any kind of career path. However, from the very beginning her enthusiasms dictated her direction.

When Rachael completed her Arts degree (German, Geography and European Studies) in the early 90s the Internet was still an infant. There was no hint of digital in her future. Instead, her interest in human geography led her to complete a thesis in landlord-tenant laws, which in turn led to her first job as a housing advisor for a charity.

Her move towards an online career came after six years in housing and was “a combination of push and pull factors”. The push was that she’d burnt out from the high energy and emotional demands of the job: “Towards the end of my time in housing I’d lost my enthusiasm for it. And if you don’t really care about what you’re doing, if you don’t put your heart and soul into it, then you’re not getting  much out of it, and nor are your clients.”

The first step into digital

The pull factor was courtesy of a University of Sussex science summer school course that included website design. Rachael built her first website in a week of afternoon classes and loved it. She’d always had an interest in technology, partly because of her father’s work as an IT consultant for IBM, but this combined technology with creativity. A new enthusiasm took hold.

A career switch would have been difficult though without the help of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Recognising the communication gulf that existed between developers and the general population, they were eager to encourage people with a good Arts background to retrain to enable them to act as intermediaries between technical developers and businesses.

Rachael followed her gut instinct and took one of the bursaries they were offering, completing an MSc in Information Systems in 1998. She joined Cogapp as a producer in 1999 and hasn’t looked back.  

Transferable skills

In her current job Rachael does a lot of interviews with her clients to understand what they need. From interviewing countless homeless people she’s come to realise that “the problems and issues that people present with are not necessarily the ones that you need to tackle.” You need the listening skills and the insight to get to the real problems, something she had the opportunity to develop.

And her previous job also gave her a sense of perspective that is useful when dealing with work “crises”.

“It sounds like a really strange career move to go from housing advice and dealing with homeless people to IT. But there are transferable skills, and one of those is to stay calm in crisis. If you have a homeless person come in who is really having a crisis, the last thing they want is a housing advisor who joins in getting panicked or cries.” 

“I once had a family arrive on a Friday afternoon: mum, dad, three kids, dog and a hamster in a cage, homeless. Now that is a crisis. A website going down is not really, if you think about it. You never want to let your colleagues or your clients down, but a sense of perspective is helpful. Stand back a little bit – stay calm, be pragmatic. What is the core problem here, and what can we reasonably and achievably do about it? We all care so much about what we do that it’s easy to lose perspective.”

What you need to be a good producer

Being a successful producer is as much about tact as it is about technology according to Rachael. You don’t need to be an adept programmer, but you do need to understand the possibilities and practicalities of technology: “you need to have an enthusiasm for it.”

And you need the “ability to communicate and to see both sides, to have a basic understanding of the technology, but really to appreciate that the technology’s only useful if it’s solving a business need.”

“It’s interesting how little of our job is actually dependent on the technology. So much of it is managing client expectations, problem solving, finding out what the issues are. So a lot of tact and diplomacy goes into our job to try and manage client’s expectations.”

You must also not be afraid to be unpopular, especially if a project is going wrong. “You have to crack the whip with the team and tell clients they can’t always have what they want.” And you have to be pragmatic. “I’m a big fan of pragmatism. What is achievable in the timeframe, within the budget, and to a good quality?”

Rachael advises that it’s important to try and get relevant experience, even if it’s as part of the work experience or thesis on a course, or as part of a formal internship programme, such as that run by Wired Sussex.

Being a perfectionist is clearly also a trait that has made a good producer of Rachael, who thinks at the end of every project “we could’ve done that better”. But she believes this is a trait that keeps her learning and pushing boundaries.

Career satisfaction

Rachael’s job often involves long hours and high pressure, but it also involves fascinating work and interesting people. She’s been fortunate in finding a company that shares her ethos in working on projects that benefit the public, and in working with a team of fellow enthusiasts, without whom she reckons life would be very different.

Undoubtedly it’s taken a huge amount of work and skill to get to her current position, but Rachael never had a big plan to get to where she is today. “I have had the exact opposite of a career strategy. The key has just been picking out things that I’ve found interesting and enthusiastic about, and going with them.”

Enthusiasm has apparently served her well as a guide.

Interview by Helen Keevy, Core Copywriting, Brighton