7 Alternative Careers for Interior Designers

What is one alternative career for interior designers?

To help you identify alternative careers for interior designers, we asked career coaches and experienced recruiters this question for their best recommendations. From Project Designing to Furniture Sales to Landscape Design, there are several careers that may serve as good alternatives to interior design.

Here are seven alternative careers for interior designers:

• Project Designing
• Furniture Sales
• Website Designer
• Exhibition Design
• Fabric Designer
• Stage Designer
• Landscape Design

Project Designer

One possible career for an interior designer is becoming a project designer. Project designers help plan the first elements of a project when a budget is determined. They may be involved in different aspects depending on the industry but project designers work in all types of fields like technology and construction.

A possible avenue for a project designer is to stage homes for house flippers, which would be the perfect job for an interior designer. The salary is a good one with even the bottom ones early $47,000 and the median annual salary $62,498. Top earners can make as much as $82,000.

Baruch Labunski, Rank Secure

Furniture Sales

Try your hand at furniture sales. For example, a former interior designer currently selling furniture not only has the ability to sell the piece of furniture itself, but can provide the customer with a vision of the entire room, making that one piece of furniture that much more desirable and necessary. With a background in interior design, you can offer a customer looking at just one couch the bigger picture, showing the customer that this big-ticket purchase is wholly sensible.

Bradley Hall, Sonu Sleep

Website Designer

A great interior designer may have the skill set to make an excellent website designer. A good friend of mine made that exact career transition, and she has had a lot of success. Both jobs benefit from a great eye for detail, and an understanding of what appeals to the eye of a visitor to your room or website. There are also subtle esthetic tools that many people don’t think of, such as the correct use of negative space. If you are like my friend, a great interior designer who wants to change careers, you may want to give serious thought to learning website design.

Marcus Hutsen, Patriot Coolers

Exhibition Design

Interior designers with a flair for artistic skills can pursue exhibition design. Exhibition spaces or museums require expert skills and creativity. From the arrangement of product displays to lighting, exhibition design covers a broad scope of responsibilities. Exhibitions for art, handcraft, and businesses happen regularly and designers play an essential role in them. Art exhibitions and museums need a designer's expertise and skills to look after including even the seating arrangement. Businesses need designers to portray their brand's messages and stories through vivid displays and audio-visual aids in their exhibitions.

Samantha Odo, Precondo

Fabric Designer

Many interior designers are always looking for the perfect print to accent the houses they are designing and end up designing a fabric or picture they can get printed on demand. Placing the pictures with your design, hanging curtains or upholstering a chair in the print in the house has a unique touch. Afterwards you can keep the print online for print on demand or if you want to get the fabric mass printed, you can sell bolts of it online to other designers, sewers and craftspeople. Use designs you create and sell them over and over.

Marissa Loewen, Create the Rules

Stage Designer

As an interior designer, you often have to be creative and imaginative in your work. If you still enjoy these aspects of your job, consider a career as a stage designer. A stage designer is responsible for designing sets for the movie, theater, and TV productions. Based on a prepared script, the director's vision, or own aesthetic sense, stage designers prepare the background of the events watched on screen or stage. Such a person must also demonstrate attention to detail. As a stage designer, you can't avoid physical work either, as you ensure proper setup and takedown of each set. If this description sounds interesting, try this profession out. Earnings of $85,986 per year are an extra incentive.

Nina Paczka, MyPerfectResume

Landscape Designer

Interior designers are already trained on how to design spaces that are appealing to people’s eyes and impact their psychology. They might use this skill to design outdoor spaces with similar or better impacts than closed spaces. In a world where people prefer being indoors and in virtual realities, they could develop spaces that make people want to be outdoors again. Apart from their skills, landscape design helps them broaden their skills and provides them with a bigger canvas to work with, thus a better challenge for them.

Ivy Bosibori, USBadCreditLoans