Not so long ago, Robert Agee was earning a living doing electrical work. And hating it. Fast forward a few years with the determination to make a career change. Add a DCCCD associate degree, and today, he’s a senior designer in the Corporate Markets Division of Fossil Inc. at its international headquarters in Richardson.

“I had been doing electrical work, and I knew that I didn’t want to do it any more,” he says. “A counselor at Brookhaven College went through all of their programs with me, and Visual Communications was the one that stood out. So I just jumped in and went from there.”

For three years, he went to school and worked. As he was finishing his associate degree, he began looking, with his professor’s help, for an internship. He had his sights set on Fossil, but they didn’t have an internship available. Robert offered to freelance for them. Soon an official internship did become available and the rest, as they say, is history.

“I started at the bottom of the corporate ladder and worked my way up,” he says. “I worked as a junior designer and a production artist putting logos on watches; then I moved into custom work designing products and packages. The Corporate Markets Division deals with the premium incentives side of the business — putting corporate logos on items like watches for recognition awards, and designing catalogs, fliers, Web sites and custom packaging.”

Granted, he’s learned a lot on the job. The basic tools of his trade, though, he learned in Brookhaven’s Visual Communications program.

“At Brookhaven, l learned the computer programs that I use every day on the job,” he says. “The best part was learning how the programs work and how much I could do with them. The possibilities are virtually endless — once you discover that, the sparks just start flying in your head and you can really get creative.”

For a guy to whom sparks were once a bad thing, that’s a good thing.

For Robert Agee, it all began here.