5 Things Every Video Editor Needs to Know for Career Success

What are the most important lessons for video editing career success?

The key to editing career success comes down to specializing in your strengths, collaborating with other specialists, embracing feedback, finding the right mentor, and never giving up. These five principles can transform your editing journey from struggling for work to thriving in your specialty.

Stop Chasing Every Editing Job

Early in your career, you'll feel like you should take any editing work that comes your way. I had this exact mindset — I'm an editor, so everyone who needs an editor should hire me. I was working day and night with this "edit everything" approach.

But when I went to create a demo reel, I faced a harsh reality. Looking at my clips, I had no idea what to include. I had a little bit of everything: short montages, commercials, funny pieces, serious work, talking head corporate videos, short documentaries, even clips from a feature-length documentary.

I took this collection to my mentor, hoping he'd give me an exact list of what to include. Instead, he dropped two pieces of bombshell advice: only include your very best stuff, and double down on what you're good at.

This advice required me to be self-aware for the first time. I wasn't really thinking about which projects were my best, which were weaker, and what I actually liked working on.

After some reflection, I realized my weaker stuff was probably the short montages and my best work was the narrative commercials, particularly the comedic ones. Even though it was super hard, I decided to only include comedic commercials on my reel. More importantly, I was only going to go after that type of work.

The outcome? I ended up getting more narrative commercial work than ever before. At first, turning down other editing jobs felt scary, but eventually I had more work than before — and I was doing something I loved. When you're enjoying the process, you create better work.

If you're going after every editing job, give yourself permission to assess your work. Pick the things that are your best and that you like working on most, then double down on those even if you have to say no to other stuff.

Master Collaboration Over Solo Work

Once I focused on my strengths, I discovered a new problem: there were aspects of my work that weren't living up to my taste. As editors, we're often required to do everything, especially at certain budget levels. You're not just the editor — you're also the colorist, the designer, the motion graphics artist, even the sound mixer.

Design and motion graphics were probably my weakest skills. But as I started getting more commercial work with higher budgets, more specialists came on board. Suddenly there was a motion graphics artist, a specialist who just did color grading, and a sound mixer. I was just responsible for the editing.

Not only was I not having to do those things I was weaker at, but the quality of the work skyrocketed because all these great collaborators were adding their artistry.

I realized I was best at editing and sound design, and I wanted to go all-in on those two things. I still needed working knowledge of the rest — even today, sometimes I still do my own color grading and motion graphics — but whenever I had the choice, I would always choose to be on a team.

You might think this only works for commercials with big budgets, but you can apply this principle anywhere. If you're editing by yourself, find out what you're good at, make connections with other people, find out what they're good at, and then barter. When I don't have a big budget, I trade my skills. I might sound design a friend's project and he'll do a motion graphic for my project.

This is a great way to start practicing collaboration. Professional video editing workflow for commercials often involves these collaborative relationships. Filmmaking, after all, is a collaborative art form.

Embrace Feedback as Creative Fuel

There's one skill required for great editing that's not only one of the most difficult things to do as an editor, but one of the most difficult things to do as a human: getting feedback.

When your creative work is criticized, do you take it personally? I did, and that's why I would dread receiving feedback. Way later in my career than I'd care to admit, I realized I needed a mindset shift because the feedback process was creating too much stress.

I ended up adopting the number one rule of improv comedy. When someone comes up with a line in improv and the person responds with "no," it stops the creative flow. So the number one rule is to say "yes, and." You accept their idea and add to it.

I started building that habit. When feedback would come in, I would think "yes, and." Yes, I want to try this creative idea and I want to add to it. It eventually became this fun creative game. Adding my own creative ideas to the mix and going back and forth made it really enjoyable.

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Now, 20 years into my career, I can honestly say that feedback and the collaborative creative process is my favorite part of editing. The faster you can make this mindset shift, the better.

Find the Right Mentor for Your Goals

This point would have saved me years of frustration. It took me about four years of diligent hard work from when I first opened editing software to where things started to click.

It wasn't from reading books, though that helped. It wasn't studying classic cinema, though that helped too. And it wasn't even from taking my first few classes at film school. Everything started to click when I found a mentor who was a real pro editor. I knew I wanted to be an editor, but I had never met a pro editor willing to take me behind the scenes of their real-world projects.

Don't just find any mentor — find the right mentor for you. If you want to learn rock guitar and there are two teachers available — one is a jazz improviser who teaches you to read music and the other is a rock guitar player who teaches you to play by ear — the latter is the right teacher for you.

Most of my editing experience is with commercials and short-form narrative. If you're passionate about experimental filmmaking or feature-length documentary work, I may not be the right mentor for you, and that's totally okay.

The key is finding someone whose work aligns with where you want to go, not just someone who happens to edit professionally.

Never Give Up on Your Editing Journey

If there's one reason I was able to make it this far in my career, it's not because I'm the most talented editor. In fact, I'm sure I'm not. Have you ever heard the quote "winners are just losers who don't quit"? I think this defines my editing career to a tee.

Yes, there were times I wanted to quit. There were even times I took an extended break from editing. But overall, I just kept at it. I wanted to encourage you that if you keep going, you will eventually get to where you want to be as an editor.

The path isn't always linear, and progress doesn't happen overnight. But consistency and persistence will get you further than talent alone ever could.

Edit Like A Broadcast Pro teaches you how to create emotionally-impactful edits that win serious clients with real budgets.