UX career paths: A how-to guide
Creating a UX-focused career path that works for your situation and company context.
What goals do I have? Where do I see myself in 5 years? How can I grow? And how can I get there at my current job?
Unless you are part of a UX-led company, you likely won’t have a UX-focused career path to help you grow. We found ourselves in this exact situation at Randstad. But although there are plenty of UX career matrixes, paths, or ladders to be found online, none of them was a fit for our particular context. This lack motivated us to create our own. We will show you how to create a career path that makes sense for your situation and how to make this path grow with you.
What do we mean by a UX-focused career path, and why do you need one?
A career path is a sequence of steps that lead to your short- and long-term career goals. The career path describes every seniority level’s tasks, responsibilities, and skills.
In addition, a UX-focused career path usually adds two parallel but equal tracks: a manager and an individual contributor track. Traditional companies often require you to take on a role as a manager or lead as the only way to climb up the ladder (check out NN group’s video on this topic). If you don’t have the aspiration to manage people and want to focus on your craft instead, you won’t be able to grow anymore at some point. A UX-focused career path ensures individual contributors are as important and appreciated as someone with leading aspirations.
But having a career path has many more benefits on every seniority level:
- It’s valuable self-knowledge
- It increases motivation and productivity
- it makes it worthwhile to stay on board longer
- If you grow, the company grows
- It is a helpful reference for hiring new employees
Why not just copy-paste a career path from another company?
The urgent need for a career path could nudge you towards copying a career path from the internet. After all, there is plenty to find online: such as this Levels Framework by Peter Merholz, this Growth Plan from Vend, the UK government’s Framework, or these Job Levels from Intercom. But you will find out — like we did — that none of them is a good fit. You’ll want to create a career path that allows people to grow in your organization. The best way to do this is to combine your company’s unique situation and create ownership within your UX team.
Our experience taught us that the company’s context is essential when creating a usable UX career path. Roles, skills, and habits within a career path are specific to your company’s structure, culture, pains, gains, and goals. Your career path should reflect these unique problems and opportunities.
A UX-focused career path ensures individual contributors are as important and appreciated as someone with leading aspirations.
The other reason to create your own path is that the career path is a solution for your users: your UX team. They can make or break your career path. Having them involved at the start is essential to ensure everyone feels comfortable with the content of the career path and creates buy-in. Later in this article, we’ll show you how to do this.
Creating a UX career path for YOUR organization
Now you know why you should have a career path. Let us take you through the actual steps you could take (with real-life examples).
The basic steps:
- Gather input
- Make your first draft
- Use it or lose it
1. Gather input
The first step of forming a career path is creating a shared understanding of its baseline. Do this by gathering as much information as possible on what your UX team(s) think a junior, medior, senior, etc. should do. An easy way to gather input for your path is to do a brainwriting workshop.
What to prepare — Be sure you have mapped out every possible UX seniority level. Most common are junior, medior, senior, or use whatever terminology your organization is accustomed to.
Consider then what role(s) follow after senior. At Randstad, we distinguish between a leading role (where you manage UX people) and individual contributors (where you lead in your UX expertise), which we have dubbed ‘craft experts.’ If you don’t have any roles yet or are not sure you have a complete picture, you can reserve some time to brainstorm the types of roles during the workshop.
Once you’ve cleared up your seniority levels and following tracks, create a frame for each career step on a (digital) whiteboard.
Who to include in your session — Include all UX experts, whether UX research, interaction design, visual design, or whatever expertise you have in-house. Don’t separate workshops per specialization, but focus first on creating a baseline for every UX expertise.
Last but not least: be sure to include UXers of all levels, as it is essential to have the expectations of different levels of seniority made explicit. So no one is left behind: neither your VP of design nor the intern who started last week.
Brainwriting workshop — This exercise will help describe each level's expected skills, habits, tasks, and responsibilities.
- Create groups of 3 to 5 participants and assign each group to a frame. Ensure each group contains participants from different levels and expertise to encourage discussion. So, for example, please don’t put all juniors in one group and seniors in the other, but mix it up.
- Each group gets 5 minutes to write as many post-its as possible for their frame. At this step, nothing is wrong, and people have the opportunity to speak freely about their expectations of certain levels.
- Each group moves on to the next frame when the time is up. They briefly reflect on what the previous group has written, using that new knowledge to add more post-its to the frame.
- After 5 minutes, each group moves unto the next frame, repeating the process until everyone has covered every level.
- Let each group cluster the post-its from the last frame they contributed and reflect on the outcomes with everyone.
2. Make your first draft
Using all the input, create the first draft of your path. Don’t aim for perfection but for getting an MVP that you can put into use and get feedback on:
Extract qualities for every UXer — If your brainstorm looked anything like ours, you might end up with some post-its that don’t describe skills but character traits. Think of post-its like “Not afraid to make mistakes” or “Open to learning and growing.” These qualities are not specific to any seniority level, nor are they something you can train yourself in per se. Still, they form a baseline every UXer should meet to grow within your specific company successfully. Capture these qualities in a separate section that applies to every seniority level.
You don’t have to use every post-it — Be critical about the post-its and throw them away (or set them aside) when they are not reflecting the seniority level in point and don’t match expectations. To illustrate: one of the post-its stated you needed 5+ years to be a medior. Although having years of experience could help you gain the necessary skills to be a medior, it’s not a given. We removed any post-its that did not describe a clear skill, habit, or responsibility.
As for expertise-specific post-its, either park these on a separate frame for later or rewrite them to apply to any UX expert. So “You can work with Figma” becomes “You’re able to work with the right tooling for your expertise.”
Structure the rest of the input — Cluster similar post-its within each frame and give it a theme name. Next, try to see if you can connect similar themes to create lanes that span all levels. A skill will usually appear at every level, with different specifications.
Fill in the gaps — After creating your lanes, you’ll notice gaps in skills for certain levels: try to fill these in. At the junior level, we had a gap for the stakeholder management theme. This gap confronted us with the question: what do we expect from a junior regarding stakeholder management? It’s perfectly fine to say “nothing,” but make this explicit for every gap.
Make them actionable — At this point, you might notice that the post-its are written a bit too generic or passive to form a good description for your path. Rewrite post-its to be in the active state and make them more specific. So instead of “Up to date,” you end up with: “You keep up to date with your field & expertise.” In a future post, we’ll elaborate on the division between skills, habits, and responsibilities.
Decide on the structure — Check which tools (Excel, Miro, Google Doc) or structures (matrix, circles, axes, bullet points, etc.) other departments or disciplines use for their development plans, as it might help with the adoption in the organization if your UX career path has the same setup.
3. Use it or lose it
After creating your first draft, the key is to start using it as quickly as possible and improve it with feedback as often as possible. Don’t worry about perfection: like any design, release your newly made tool out into the wild and check how it performs. It should be a living document.
You can start with a simple trial run with your UX colleagues: ask them to use the matrix you’ve made for themselves and give feedback afterwards: how did they use it? Which parts were valuable? After this, decide how frequently you want to iterate on the first version career path. Give it some time so it can integrate into everyone’s way of work.
Roles, skills, and habits within a career path are specific to your company’s structure, culture, pains, gains, and goals. Your career path should reflect these unique problems and opportunities.
The next step is to figure out how to use these paths and how often. Is it just a tool to create a development plan once a year or a means to reflect on your personal growth every month? How you use it also determines how often you should use it. Both are specific to your organization. Your career path should become part of your current processes for professional growth and sync up accordingly.
Make regular feedback on your career path a part of the process. Ask for user feedback (UX), and involve the people (responsible for) helping you grow (managers, HR, coaches, mentors. etc.).
Now what?
Congratulations, you made it to your first path! You’re ready to grow as a UX expert and UX organization. But you probably have a lot more questions like:
- How do we keep this path relevant?
- How do I make a distinction between hard and soft skills?
- How do we get this path adopted by the rest of the organization?
- What’s the difference between habits, skills, and responsibilities?
- If people decide they want to develop along a specific path, where can they go next?
Recommended reading
For tips on how to advance your career as an Individual Contributor (or Craft Expert), check out this series of interviews:
How to choose between the lead and craft paths:
UX Career Path: Manager or Individual Contributor
You’re a Senior UX Designer. What’s next?
medium.com
An exploration of different career development models:
This article is the first in a series on career paths, where we’ll dive deeper into the above questions and other related topics.
This article was written by Emma Gohres and Quendoline Jansen. Feel free to connect through our bio, and if you used this article to create a career path for your organization, please share your journey with us!
