But I don’t want to be a product designer
Looking for an entry-level job that uses human-centered design skills can be discouraging. You have more options than you think.
I’ve made a huge mistake, I thought to myself, as a realization washed over me in the middle of an interview for a product design role.
“This is not what I want to do.”
It wasn’t a shock, necessarily. I had been fighting this feeling for months. I had known for a while that product design was not how I wanted to use these newly-developed skills in human-centered design.
But I left a career to pursue a boot camp. I invested a lot of resources into this. And product design, while competitive in this tough job market, is still lucrative.
But product design doesn’t capitalize on what I know to be my strengths.
How did I get here?
I had been an administrator in various positions in higher education for well over a decade. I had assessed my strengths and researched lots of different career paths before deciding on the UX route. I had lots of enjoyable experiences leading people through change, managing teams, and improving individual performance, so I knew I wanted to keep my career people-focused. I’m also a systems thinker, so I explored strategy-oriented fields, but none felt like the right fit — project management was too detail-oriented; change management was too limited in scope; product management was too big of a leap without prior technical experience.
I chose to pursue UX design because I thought it was the best combination of these interests. I gravitated toward the theories of human-centered design — iterative improvement plus empathy.
I knew I would need additional education, but didn’t want another Master’s degree. I would need to choose a field that would provide entry-level opportunities from a boot camp. And that boot camp would need to provide the hands-on, practical experience that would help land that first job.
In my boot camp, we were forced to choose a focus on either UX or UI. I had no interest in UI, for the aforementioned reasons, so I eagerly dug into the UX process. I loved pouring over research; connecting the dots; synthesizing data into artifacts like personas, journey maps, and task flows; brainstorming solutions; pitching ideas; strategizing approaches; testing and iterating concepts through the use of low- and mid-fidelity wireframes and prototypes. I was taught that these were things UX Designers did.
After completing my program, I quickly discovered that UX Designer roles, as strictly as presented in my boot camp, are largely a myth.
If being on the UX job market for several months has taught me anything, it’s that the word “designer” is reserved for those with UI and visual design skills.
All the entry-level roles are called Product Designer or UX/UI Designer and rely heavily on UI skills.
Job duties that just one year ago I learned as ‘traditional UX design’ activities have been repackaged into titles that eliminate the word “design,” like UX Researcher, UX Architect, or UX Strategist. And access to these roles tends to be limited to individuals with senior-level experience.
If a role is called UX Designer, it’s typically an interaction designer who sometimes does user research and yet still somehow still needs to have advanced knowledge of Illustrator and examples of “pixel-perfect mockups” in their portfolio.
Further, many product companies now have a design system in place, so that elements or components are ready-made for insertion into a wireframe. I’ve wondered how this level of design maturity impacts the designers’ continued development of creative and strategic skills.
I imagine that at these companies, design thinking is reserved for people in senior design roles under the label “strategy” or exists within the realm of product managers situated outside the design department entirely. In this environment, product designers run the risk of simply being assembly-line wireframe production artists. How human-centered can this work be?
At the same time, design thinking is experiencing a surge of interest from other fields that have begun to realize advantages to the process. In fact, I would venture a guess that, given the maturity of design in product companies, the activities associated with human-centered design currently seem more accessible — at least for entry-level and junior roles — in areas like business and education than in design.
The activities associated with human-centered design currently seem more accessible — at least for entry-level and junior roles — in areas like business and education than in design.
So, have I made the wrong choice? Do I have to go back to school yet again? Have I wasted time and money?
Now what?
It’s a scary and vulnerable proposition to approach your own career as an iterative design process. Testing and trying new things will yield dead ends, just the same.
It’s a scary and vulnerable proposition to approach your own career as an iterative design process. Testing and trying new things will yield dead ends, just the same.
Also the same, then, is the need to approach each dead-end not as a failure but an opportunity to learn.
So, nothing is wasted as long as I learn.
Therefore, I have been exploring other avenues where one might carve out a path putting to use skills in human-centered design. After all, an important skill in this work is the ability to pivot!
The following areas and roles capitalize on a similar combination of strategic and empathetic skills seen in the rare UX designer role. Many of these are extremely exciting paths that can lead to leadership roles or overlap with adjacent career trajectories.
This LinkedIn Learning course was a great overview of different User Experience and UX-adjacent roles.
UX Research
The most likely place to look if you want to engage in traditional UX activities that support the design of a product. As product companies grow larger and more mature in their design departments, opportunities for researchers tend to increase.
Designers at these companies, though not engaging in the research themselves, still need to understand their users. Dedicated user researchers conduct formative and evaluative research in the form of user interviews, competitive analysis, concept evaluation, and usability tests using various qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Some duties may also overlap with data scientists or product managers, which is handy if those are future career interests.
For more information, check out the Mixed Methods podcast and Slack community, as well as the People Nerds blog, with this post in particular.
Service Design
Service design is to customer experience what UX design is to digital user experience. In other words, if you want to design experiences that aren’t necessarily limited to a screen, this is a great place to look.
Service Design is extremely popular in Europe but is recently gaining more traction in the states as businesses begin using more user-centric practices in other areas of their business. The process is also being used heavily in healthcare and government as a way to create more effective service models. Service Design teams are being created and demand will likely continue to grow.
Check out Service Design Network, Practical Service Design, and the work and writing of Marc Stickdorn.
Customer Experience (CX)
Customer Experience is the strategic work that drives service design. It aligns a holistic view of all the ways in which a customer engages with the business with that company’s overall goals. It seeks to increase customer loyalty and satisfaction with the company’s overall brand and is closely related to other customer-centric areas like “customer success” or “customer service.”
Some of my recent work experience was as a CX Researcher with a company called Highland Solutions. They’ve recently launched Highland Academy if you’re looking for additional skills in this area.
For more information, CX Accelerator has a Slack channel and a comprehensive primer. Also, check out the work of Jeannie Walters.
Learning Experience, Instructional Design
Similar to “user” and “customer,” the “learning” in Learning Experience is the overarching strategy term to encompass the content and information architectural work of the Instructional Designer.
Check out this amazing overview article written by a practicing Learning Experience professional.
Instructional Designers are everywhere. As learning increasingly takes on a digital format, these roles are in high demand. However, the field suffers from a bit of the same complexity and role confusion as User Experience. You’ll see eLearning Developer and Curriculum Designer, too, which require slightly different skills. So, read job descriptions carefully and do your homework.
However, many skills of a UX designer are immediately transferrable. In fact, the ADDIE model that instructional designers use is nearly identical to the Design Thinking process.
Instructional Designers are employed by universities and K-12 schools to help professors and teachers deliver lessons online, but opportunities for higher earning potential exist in the learning & development teams at large companies and corporations. Usually, but not always, these teams are situated within the Human Resources department.
To learn more, the I’m New Here podcast is a wonderful overview with tips for entering the field. Also, check out the Association for Talent Development, among other professional associations listed in this presentation from UChicago’s graduate program. I also recommend reading the book Design for How People Learn and this series of blog posts. Finally, join the community and find relevant events at LXD.org.
Organizational Development
Related to those human resource departments with robust learning teams, folks in Organizational Development train and evaluate the performance of employees, but they also leverage human-centered design skills to improve processes and systems that help organizations manage change.
To apply the transferrable skills of a UX designer to this field, simply think of it as Employee Experience design. You would be designing the experience of an employee, from the time they are a candidate, through onboarding as a new employee, and into professional development. By doing so, you are designing a company’s overall culture.
Check out this article from the HR Trend Institute.
Beyond this, you may also be involved in designing the systems and processes that leadership uses to make key decisions about the strategy of the business, influencing long-term planning processes, overseeing the successful implementation of new software tools, and testing service models that impact the efficiency of the company.
This Master’s program at Northwestern University with certificate options is appealing to me and just the visuals immediately draw comparisons to my design thinking education. It’s a whiteboard! And post-its! Suddenly, I can see myself doing this.
Business Consulting
If Organizational Development is interesting to you, you could also make big bucks consulting for businesses. Much of the work is similar to that of in-house organizational developers, but instead of being an employee of a company’s HR department, you get hired by a company to do that work as a consultant.
This work always seemed intimidating to me, and I always assumed I would need an MBA to do it. While this may still be largely the case, some entry-level work exists for design thinkers.
Don’t be discouraged if you’ve spent time and money on training only to find that your career needs to take a different path. Hang in there and start asking different questions. Figure out how you can leverage those skills in other ways.
Stay curious. Stay creative. Or, as someone once told me: Don’t be afraid to get weird with it.
You’ve got this!
Chad Wilson is a design thinker interested in helping organizations improve systems, support learning, and facilitate change. If you want someone who can readily assess opportunities for innovation, connect the dots in data, lead strategic change, and support and grow a culture of continued learning and development, connect with me on LinkedIn or check out my website.
