Getting Ready for your Interior Decorator Job

Before you start applying for jobs or looking for clients, it's a good idea to take some preliminary steps to prepare yourself for an interior decorating and design career. By following the advice in this article, you could make yourself much more attractive to prospective employers and clients. You will discover how to develop essential skills and learn interior decorating.

Are You a "Born Decorator"?

Interior decorators need to use a variety of skills to do their job well. As you will read in this article, all the skills you need to succeed as an interior decorator can be learned. However, if you are a "born decorator" – in other words, if you already have a natural aptitude for decorating – entering this career will be even easier for you. Here are a couple of ways to determine if you already have the basic skills you will need, or if you will need to brush up on them.

Signs of Decorating Talent

If you are a "born decorator" you likely have already demonstrated your ability in a number of ways. See how many of the following are true for you:

You love to redecorate your own home. You may get the urge to rearrange the furniture even when other family members think it looks "just fine."
You appreciate beauty – in art, in people, in nature, or in things.
When you visit someone's house for the first time you notice ways they could make their home more attractive, functional, or comfortable. (Although you don't necessarily tell them unless they ask!)
You are artistic or creative.
If you belong to a social club, you are the one people turn to when they want decorations done for an event.
You have a strong sense of the best placement for things within a particular space.
Friends compliment you about how beautifully your home is decorated and may ask for your advice about how to decorate their own.

There is a common theme running through the above list. The most important trait for a decorator to have is a strong aesthetic sense - also known as a "good eye." This comes naturally to some people, while others have to work to develop it. In this article you will learn how to develop and improve this vital trait.

Personality Type

In addition to having a good eye, interior decorators typically have a number of other skills. The most important of these are interpersonal skills. A successful decorator must be an effective communicator in order to attract clients and develop relationships with suppliers (companies that supply decorating materials such as furniture, fabrics, etc.). Decorators who are skilled at reading people and negotiating can be tremendously successful. These skills are typical of people with certain "personality types," as defined by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. A renowned system for measuring personality types, the MBTI looks at four dimensions of personality:

Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I)
Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N)
Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F)
Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P)

You can come up with a four-letter "personality type" by determining your preferences for each of these four dimensions. Here are a few very basic examples, with the letters in brackets indicating what personality dimension each trait corresponds with:

Are you more extraverted (E) or more introverted (I)?
Do you tend to trust your intuition (N) or trust what you see and hear (S)?
Do you focus more on thoughts (T) or feelings (F)?
Do you prefer life to be more structured (J) or more spontaneous (P)?

Out of the 16 possible personality types, one that is particularly well suited to interior decorating is ENFP (Extraverted INtuitive Feeling Perceiving), but it is important to remember that all kinds of people can and do succeed in this career. While someone with an ENFP or a similar personality type may be more naturally inclined to use skills such as persuasive communication, reading people, and negotiating, these skills can be developed by any personality type. For example, someone who is an ISFJ type can do well in interior decorating because they have a natural aptitude for a very different type of skill needed by interior decorators - organizational ability.

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