How to choose your design career path?
Product designer’s guide to working in tech
Career perception
For us, designers (or people who work in creative industries) career helps to define who we are as human beings. It’s part of our identity and has an effect on ourselves, our family, as well as our surroundings. Certainly establishing your credibility as a design professional takes time and effort, though for each of us our career path started when we took the first required actions. The painter Vincent van Gogh once put it quite well how intimidating the new start can look like:
You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter, “You can’t do anything.” The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of “You can’t.”
But for design practitioners, there is another challenge, which is losing sight of your career goals while spending time on day-to-day work. You may ask yourself, so how do I keep myself motivated, excited, and passionate about my work in design? There is this interesting idea I came across the other day looking for some inspiration on a specialty topic.
Instead of working toward retirement, work toward your ideal lifestyle. There is usually a path to get there in a few years instead of a few decades. — James Clear
Even though this is easier said than done, the idea is quite simple. We need to look for our personal preferences and carefully analyze all the choices we have. Luckily in product design, we do have many options, which makes it easy to adjust career paths on the go. The hardest part remains to find the perfect match for yourself:
- Working mode. Freelancer, Contractor, Employed, etc.
- Primary focus. UX design, UX research, Visual design, Product management, Motion design, etc.
- Product industry. FinTech, EdTech, HealthTech, Blochchain, MarkTech, you name it.
Why we quit and seek more
The reason why designers change jobs frequently, try different career paths tends to be the same as in other industries.
- People don’t feel engaged in their work. Worldwide employee engagement is in a huge crisis. Globally only 13% of employees working for an organization are engaged.
- Some people feel lost. Achievements not always give a sense of satisfaction. At some point, people may feel apart from their work, there is no much else in life. The feeling of being lost mainly can be related due to a lack of professional growth plan or lack of mentorship.
- People feel uncertainty. Layoffs on the way or dying industry that lacks future perspectives can give a sense of anxiety and unease.
- Young adults don’t have the luxury of a gap year. Growing up in developing countries or starting studies just after graduation is only one of the reasons. That’s why taking a gap year needs to be the new normal in making the first steps in the career.
Have you experienced this way before? These indications in your professional design career, are good signals for required career changes. To make your design career path decisions easier I would like to discuss some of the well-known career development models.
Career development models
Ikigai: the Japanese secret to a long and happy life. For those who don't find purpose, a time-tested model like this one is a real jewel. Defining reason or the true purpose for being in Japanese philosophy is called Ikigai. It’s what gets you up every morning and keeps you going.
Ikigai is a lifestyle philosophy that attempts to balance the spiritual with the practical aspects of your working activities. This model teaches us to achieve peace of mind by balancing four core elements:
- What you love
- What the world needs
- What you are good at
- What you can get paid for
Ikigai also teaches us to find balance in conflicting human desires, whether it is looking for meaning, finding enjoyment, or easy life with money. Quite interestingly there is no word for “retirement” in Japan, which correlates quite well with James Clear’s idea about working toward an ideal lifestyle.
I-shaped, T-shaped, and other career models. I’ve heard about the T-shaped specialized generalist model while working in a team with senior Java developers at IBM. Interestingly, the need for building diverse and collaborative teams is nothing new. The T-shaped person model was first widely adopted by IDEO CEO Tim Brown to evaluate candidates on both their breadth of knowledge and depth of experience. Later on, it became common practice in Agile software development to assemble product teams from cross-skilled developers, testers, and designers. Right now, there are many articles popularizing even more generalized specialists or hybrid professionals so to speak, with the letter combinations going from Pi to X or Combo shaped models.
Which career model should you choose or develop? Apparently, there is no wrong answer to this, because it depends on your personality type and how you want to be perceived in the market. Though, the trend in the product design industry is moving from T-shaped designer to Pi-shaped content designer. The reasons for this design shift towards product generalists can be explained due to:
- The importance of UX writing and other disciplines like research, management, and coding in tech companies. In the startup environment, don’t be surprised being the one writing all the texts for digital products or accidentally sitting more than on one chair at a time and doing not 100% design-related tasks.
- Drastically expanding product design teams create a need for product designers to acquire knowledge in management and soft skills. Of course, if you want a more specialized career path within the company, it’s better to choose a larger company or corporation with an established design team and its’ processes.
- Product designers in the tech industry have come into higher demand and they are joining startups and companies at early business stages because of the need of making products more beautiful, intuitive, and useful. Adil Siddiqui in his article questions whether you’re ready to be the first designer in a startup company because you will have to do quite different types of tasks.
You’ve to design everything. EVERYTHING!
The brand identity, product wireframes, design system, user interface guidelines, design processes, landing pages, mobile apps, prototypes, developer documentation, t-shirts, stickers, merchandise, business cards, employee id card, advertising materials, print designs, social media posts, investors decks, sales decks, pitch decks, internal decks, training decks, email newsletters, etc. The list goes on. — Adil Siddiqui
The learning zone model. In order to learn, we have to explore the unknown. Moving out of your comfort zone, picking a few new challenges comes with a great reward.
Originally developed by the German adventure pedagogue Tom Senninger, the model aims to illustrate how we can create learning situations.
This model helps to remember to always push yourself towards the learning phase, whether it’s related to the new design tools, industry domain knowledge, advancing technology, or the changes in a design workflow.
The bottom line.
Choosing a design career path can be a daunting task. It takes time and effort to find your own way in the tech industry. But it becomes easier to shape your skillset and position yourself in the market by getting to know your personal goals and preferences.
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