Recently, I’ve had a few discussions with friends and acquaintances where they’ve complained of feeling discontented with their career. They feel they’ve been working hard, but aren’t really getting anywhere.

Busy does not equal effective.

A few quick follow up questions usually reveal the root of the problem:

They need an update in some aspect of their business

You might be auditioning on P2P sites all day long, but really you need more training.

You might be self-marketing, but you are approaching it the wrong way and turning off potential buyers.

You might have been a working pro for a long time, but recently things have dried up and you’re not sure why.

How are you feeling these days?

Do things in your career seem to be progressing at a steady clip…or do you feel stagnant?

How do you know when it’s time for an update?

If you’re feeling stagnant, here are the diagnostic questions you should ask yourself to see where you could use an update:

What is your current goal in your career? (Be specific—how will you know you’ve achieved your goal?)

How do you currently spend your time working on your career, and honestly, how much time are you spending?

Then, thinking about your career, when was the last time you:

Reached a career goal?
Took a class or workshop?
Worked with a NEW teacher or coach?
Reassessed your approach to the business?
Read a recent book about your industry or a related topic?
Went to an industry event and/or met someone new in the industry?
Updated your demos, website, P2P profiles, or other portfolio pieces?

Let me address each of these one by one…

Goals:

Sometimes, we get to a point where our goals are leftover from a previous version of ourselves, and we keep them because we don’t know what else to do.

Just like it might be time to let go of your favorite clubbing top from your just-post-college days and buy yourself something that feels fabulously you NOW, it might also be time to let go of goals that you keep holding onto because you hope you’ll fit back into them one day.

Alternately, if you don’t have a goal at all, or your goal is vague, how can you know if you have achieved it? And if you don’t have any career goals, at all, what keeps you engaged and excited about your work?

People do their best work when they are inspired by a meaningful purpose. Do you have that in your work, or are you just getting by on “getting by?”

Money is great, but it’s better when you’re serving a bigger purpose in the world

Skills:

This industry (and most, TBH) has many niches and different areas to explore. Resting on your laurels is a sure way to lose your enthusiasm and get stale.

Want to keep things fresh always? Keep exploring! Take a class. Learn a new skill. The pursuit of mastery is never over, and it’s dangerous to get to a place where we think we know everything about a topic.

Stay open and curious, and keep exploring new skills and new approaches to your work.

Greg here recently took up macrame and knitting

Teachers/Coaches:

Once in a while you might find an amazing teacher who you can learn from for years.

But each teacher has their own POV, set of skills, and approach. So no matter how much you like one particular teacher, the best results are going to be found by exploring your options and finding other teachers you like who help you to develop a different type of understanding or approach to your work.

If you’ve been working with one coach or teacher for a while, and you’ve gotten to a plateau, it’s probably time to move on. Look at who has the career you want, and ask them who they work with.

Not every teacher is for everyone, but knowing who is most respected and sought after in your industry is at least a good starting point for narrowing down the list.

Also, if you are brand new to something, it’s possible that you think your teacher is great because they praise you all the time or don’t give you a lot of negative feedback.

While encouragement is important, if your teacher rarely ever gives you any kind of challenging critique, then you should definitely be seeking out new teachers. Growth requires challenge.

Would you be where you are now if you had ONLY had Mrs. Lexvold for your entire life?

Approach:

The industry has changed a LOT in the past twenty years. Anyone still approaching the industry as they did twenty years ago…or even ten years ago…is probably wondering why they’re not doing as well as they could be.

Twenty years ago, the unions were still very strong, and if you sought commercial work, a lot of it was union. If you booked a job, it was most likely through an agent, and you almost certainly went to a professional studio to record. Certain genres of voiceover were almost impossible to pursue outside of LA or perhaps NYC.

Ten years ago, non-union work became much more prevalent, and people getting into voiceover created small home studios and started signing up for the two major sites offering P2P services. Things were still pretty centralized geographically, but work started to become available more widely to regional talent.

In the past couple of years, I’ve seen talented actors in the business for decades starting to wake up to the massive shifts that have occurred in the industry—realize that: they need a home studio; they need to know how to edit and to run a session on their own; and that in order to work steadily, they’ll need to seek representation outside their home market, join P2P sites, and market themselves directly to buyers as well.

For those who started on P2P sites, some of them have started to realize that it’s more competitive all of a sudden, as the market has been flooded with very talented longtime stage and on-camera actors just beginning to get their bearings as solo-preneurs in voiceover and others seeking refuge from low wages and grueling conditions of the current job market.

In order to keep up with the approaches that are working, you need to stay on top of knowing about the industry.

Knowledge:

The next two questions on the list have to do with how much you are expanding your understanding of the industry you are in, staying aware of shifts, and using other industries to help inform your approach to your work.

Some voice actors almost exclusively communicate with voice seekers, and don’t see the benefits of making friends with others within the industry. Or they have a few other voice actor friends, but are content to stay within their narrow circle.

I understand, not everyone is the extreme extrovert that I am. However, if you never get out past your narrow social sphere, or don’t pay at least cursory attention to the Facebook groups, you’re probably not going to hear about important things happening within the industry.

You won’t know why many voice actors avoid a certain P2P site. Or that another one got sold quietly to new owners. Or that another changed their terms of service in a very problematic way. Or that another changed their algorithm and you need to totally update your profile so you’ll actually get jobs.
You might not be aware that someone approaching you about a game show job is a well-known scam, and you might get taken for a lot of money. This is SUCH a well-known scam, and their emails are usually so poorly spelled, that I don’t know how this is still a thing, but obviously it works or they would have moved on to a new tactic.
You might not know that you can convert non-union work to union work through a paymaster. Or what joining the union might mean for your career. Or what Fi-Core is. Or know which agents to avoid. Or find out about certain jobs. (I have gotten so much work just through referrals from other voice actor friends!)

Basically, take responsibility for knowing what is happening in your industry. It is your business to know.

Tools:

Everything wears out or goes out of fashion eventually.

Remember when you were a teenager, and your parents embarrassed you by wearing Zubaz and a mullet?

At the time, it was hard to imagine you’d EVER be caught dead being out of fashion.

But here you are with a demo that was last updated in 2002, and you wonder why no agents will give you the time of day!

Luckily, you’re in voiceover, so you go right ahead and wear those frosted jeans and your mall bangs! Just update your damn demo.

What about your website? Once in a while I still stumble upon a website that runs on Flash, or worse, looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2004.

After a while, you, like your parents, might lose your ability to be objective about these things. So, PLEASE, get an expert opinion. Ask your agent. Ask a coach. Or even ask your Gen Z niece who learned to code in the womb, and if she snickers, it’s time to update.

Your demos, your P2P profiles, your website, your LinkedIn page—these tools are not a set-it-and-forget-it thing. They are meant to represent you as you are right now.

You are always evolving, and so is the world. Keep up!

So…how are you doing?

If you read through those questions and thought to yourself, “Wow, yeah, it’s been a while…”

I challenge you to just start with one thing to refresh your career. Then keep going, because time stops for no voice actor.

What’s it gonna be?

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Do You Need an Update?