The Designer Self Evaluation

What are you good at? What areas of your skill set do you need to improve on? Are you underpaid? How does this relate to your long term goals? How do you set long term goals? Do you suck?

Shit. That’s heavy.

No need to worry, being brutally honest with yourself professionally is something most people never do and can save you years of toil if addressed. Most 12 step programs believe that admitting your problems is the first step to recovery and it’s much the same with your career.

Malcom Gladwell’s debunked rule used to say it takes 10,000 hours to master an activity. That benchmark always did seem a bit high, but it brings up a good point. How do you determine where you are in your career and how can yo establish where you want to be? A good first step is a personal inventory — aka the SELF EVALUATION!

*Pro Tip* Be subjective, feelings have no place in evaluating your profession.

Evaluation

Here are a few techniques on evaluating yourself:

• Skills review — List your skills, rate them on some sort of scale, compare to your contemporaries with similar roles then best in class designers to find where you really sit on the spectrum.
• Compare your recent work vs. your past work to determine how far you’ve come.
• Public Sentiment — Are your public portfolios well reviewed? Do your clients recommend you on Linked In?
• Professional portfolio critique — Have a fancy pants look at your work. *Pro Tip* Take with a grain of salt. When you put people in a position of expertise they tend to believe it a little too hard.
• Success stories — Can you explain why and what you did was good, for you or your client?
• Failures — Do you have work that totally bombed? If so can you pull any lessons from that?
• Look at a job description for a gig you would love, can you fulfill all the requirements? Or do you fall short in certain areas?
• Corporate boilerplate survey questions — What are your goals moving forward? What do you need to learn/do to get there? Where do you want to be in 10 years? Describe how you’ll achieve this to someone that understands nothing about your industry.

Evaluation Retrospective

A-okay. Hopefully you’re not too deflated after your evaluation. Now let’s get to work with these tips:

• Find your voice/brand and build on it. You are the master of your own destiny.
• Solve problems with design — Either with your own projects or for clients
• Stay in your lane — We live in a market of specialists, find what your focus is and build off of it. Don’t try to be everything to everyone.
• Push product, not design porn (dribbble), if you’re not pushing your just practicing.
• Develop the ability to become impartial and emotionally unattached while being able to make quality work. Design is a service, not art show and tell.
• Try Harder — pressure is how diamonds are made… and ABI (always be interviewing) being a good interviewee comes only through practice.

Action items

Think of this as your homework from this post:

1. Evaluate yourself using the methods above… or others, I’m not the only game in town.
2. Review your findings.
3. Make a plan on next steps/goals.
4. Execute with deadlines.

Evaluations and more can be found in my upcoming book DE$IGN — A guide to wealth & success in design. In putting together DE$IGN I’ve decided to share selections of content via Medium in the hopes of gaining interest as wells feedback while I’m writing the book. For more information check out the original post.