Designing Design Careers, Part 2: Research
Drive meaning, engagement, and measurement through research.
This is the second part in a series of articles. Read Part 1 here.
Our rapidly growing design practice required a better way of supporting skill growth and career development for designers at ExxonMobil. I assumed there were plenty of improvement opportunities based on my interactions with different design teams, but I had no idea where to start or what mattered the most to them. As a result, my team began a massive research study in 2019 to understand how people felt about their design careers, skills, and contributions at ExxonMobil.
At a high level, our research process included:
- Researching design industry standards for defining design careers
- Defining research scope and aligning expectations with internal design experts
- Uncovering improvement opportunities by establishing a baseline for existing design practices
- Understanding design community needs through usability testing and interviews
- Measuring results and demonstrating progress with leadership teams
Here’s how those research activities were conducted throughout 2019 and 2020, as well as a sneak peek into design activities that came about as a result of that research:
Research Timeline
Researching Design Industry Standards
To kick off this process, my team studied how design industry leaders defined design career paths and how they fostered a culture of human-centered design within their organizations. Although the majority of these companies were more mature in design than our teams, researching their journeys and approaches helped us envision a path forward for design careers at ExxonMobil.
After researching hundreds of job posting and dozens of different companies, we realized there was no widely accepted single career framework in the design industry. However, companies did share similar characteristics in terms of how they built seniority into design positions (e.g. junior designer, senior designer) and how much human-centered design mattered to their success.
I summarized this information into multiple pages of notes, questions, concerns, and ramblings about human-centered design inside and outside of ExxonMobil so that I could share them with my team. Here’s an excerpt of one of those pages regarding design careers:
Initial Notes and Ideas About Design Careers
Several years ago, my design team worked with software development teams to define user research, interaction design, and usability testing skills for software developers. I compiled those skills and a list of additional design skills required for internal positions, external job postings, and my assumptions about designer skillsets.
At the time of this research, our internal leadership teams were considering implementing a technical career framework for all of ExxonMobil’s IT function (where design teams sit organizationally today). However, this framework didn’t make sense for design when compared to industry standards: words like technologist didn’t quite translate to design, and there were significantly more levels of seniority compared to design industry job postings.
Studying design industry leaders also made me think about what design professionals would want out of their design careers and what their career goals looked like. I wondered what type of work people were actually doing compared to official ExxonMobil job postings, their individual skillsets, and their own expectations.
To answer some of these questions, my team met with ExxonMobil design leads and craft experts first, not only to get a better understanding of their needs, but to help shape the research process moving forward.
Defining Scope and Aligning Expectations
For the purposes of this research study, we defined design experts as people at ExxonMobil in design leadership positions or people who demonstrated design craft expertise. I was pretty confident with my list of internal design experts based on my interactions with different design teams, but I validated this list with design leads and supervisors.
Before meeting with participants, my team leveraged my industry summaries and notes to create basic interview questions and guide our conversations. These questions included:
- To get started, please tell me about your job today. (probe: position expectations, prior experience)
- What skillsets are required for it? (probe: craft vs. behavioral, skill gaps)
- What skills are the most important for your team? (probe: current vs. ideal state)
- What makes it challenging to get work done? (probe: team vs. business expectations)?
- How would you describe your dream job? (probe: near-term vs. long-term)
- How feasible is that in design at ExxonMobil? (probe: outside ExxonMobil)
- Who would you define as members of our design community?
- Who else should be considered when it comes to defining design careers and skills?
- What are your aspirations for ExxonMobil design teams? (probe: near-term vs. long-term)
- What do you think will cause our design practices to fail? (probe: leadership support, organizational culture)
- What else is important for me to know that I haven’t asked you about?
After conducting interviews with design craft experts, we realized that…
All participants had similar concerns about the future of design at ExxonMobil.
Experts’ Top Three Concerns
All participants worried that we would struggle to attract and retain design professionals because there were limited opportunities beyond senior positions (e.g. senior designer). The only way to advance internally in design jobs involved becoming a team lead or supervisor, and this limited people who weren’t interested in managing design teams.
Because design leads were constantly having to justify the existence and application of design to management and project stakeholders, they worried that we couldn’t establish long-term design careers. Without a way to obtain senior leadership support, they were confident that design at ExxonMobil would fail.
Lastly, participants felt that if we couldn’t set consistent expectations and requirements for our design practices, we couldn’t work together as a single design community to achieve organizational goals and overcome shared obstacles. Inconsistency in the way teams defined design positions and set expectations also made our designers second-guess themselves, and it was challenging to transition from one team to another.
This open and honest feedback helped define the scope of initial research and determine my team’s research plan.
The initial research scope included ExxonMobil design careers as the primary focus area and internal design community members, from beginners to experts, as the primary research participants.
We defined our design community as the following people:
- Design professionals: People currently in design positions, and they want to be in design roles for the rest of their career
- Design practitioners: People whose current role may be in design, but they want to apply their design skills in a different type of role or discipline long-term
- Design enthusiasts: People who may not be in a design position today, but they want a long-term career in design
- Design explorers: People who want to learn more about design, how to apply design in a non-traditional design role, and how to build upon their existing skillsets with design skills
We conducted a baseline study with these members of our design community to measure how they felt about current skill and career development opportunities at ExxonMobil. Baseline studies are crucial for measuring how people feel about particular processes or experiences, and they are used to compare and contrast feedback after changes are made.
Collecting quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback was required to understand improvement opportunities and to get leadership on board by demonstrating the value of improving design careers.
Uncovering Career Improvement Opportunities
My team established a baseline by interviewing and surveying our design community, including over half of our full-time design professionals. This research was crucial for determining how people felt about design careers, uncovering potential improvement opportunities, and measuring progress for any efforts moving forward. When asked what mattered and to rank the importance of different scenarios at the beginning of 2019…
Here’s what mattered the most to our design community:
- Developing their own design knowledge and skills
- Being recognized for career accomplishments
- Growing and advancing their design career
Although other scenarios, such as recruiting and onboarding, mattered to research participants, these three scenarios ranked significantly higher than any others. Not only did these scenarios matter, but it was incredibly hard for people to accomplish these things at the beginning of 2019.
We assessed participants’ confidence in three main categories related to design careers by asking these questions:
- How confident are you in understanding job requirements for existing design positions?
- How confident are you in assessing and progressing your design skills at ExxonMobil?
- How confident are you in being able to achieve your design career goals at ExxonMobil?
We asked participants to quantify their confidence on a scale of 1 (not possible), 2 (not confident), 3 (not sure), 4 (confident), and 5 (very confident), and to provide explanations about their responses. By asking participants to quantify their confidence from 1 to 5, it was easier to provide metrics and measure progress, and by asking qualitative probing questions based on their responses, my team could gauge people’s satisfaction and doubts about design careers at ExxonMobil.
The results were not great.
2019 Research Insights
88% Low Confidence in Understanding Job Requirements
Most design professionals felt like they were getting meaningful work done, but because design roles and skill requirements weren’t defined, there was no way to properly set expectations with new team members and stakeholders. Because the requirements and expectations weren’t clear, people worried how others saw their contributions and if they were even appreciated.
74% Low Confidence in Progressing Design Skills
People were trying their best to learn and grow in areas that interested them, but they had no idea if that matched company expectations or if those areas were even valuable to ExxonMobil. Because there were no standards in place for design, most people felt that assessing and progressing their skills was mostly guess work.
64% Low Confidence in Achieving Design Career Goals
People were generally optimistic about design careers, but they weren’t confident about achieving their career goals at ExxonMobil. People hoped that design mattered to the company, but without formal leadership support, they worried they couldn’t progress their design careers.
There was no denying that we had plenty of improvement opportunities based on those responses. To make those insights more meaningful, we reframed our design community’s challenges as this How Might We question:
How might we enable our design community to easily develop their design skills and careers?
This question didn’t define a solution: it reframed community challenges into improvement opportunities for design at ExxonMobil. This reframing helped drive conversations with research participants, and it allowed us to test potential solutions instead of jumping to an immediate solution.
Because people were not confident about assessing and progressing their design skills and a few design skills were already defined for software developers, my team used them as a starting point for broader community interviews and usability testing. I’m focusing primarily on research and testing in these next sections, but you can learn more about how we designed these skills in the next part of this series.
Understanding Design Community Needs
My team identified the next round of research participants based on varied levels of design craft expertise, design positions, and geographic locations. Participants included roughly 20% of people in design teams at the time of the study. Purposeful sampling during the first round of research allowed us to select participants that could provide the most detailed and varied feedback across our global design community.
We created a first draft of potential design skills based on industry research and design expert interviews, and we conducted a combination of design community interviews and usability tests with these skills.
For the interviews, we leveraged several questions from earlier expert interviews and new questions that were more targeted to design careers, including:
- To get started, please tell me about your job today. (probe: prior experience, seniority)
- How does the work you do compare to your expectations? (probe: individual vs. management expectations)
- How do you know you have done a “good” job? How would you define that? (probe: personal growth)
- What do you want out of a design career? (probe: possibilities at ExxonMobil)
- How would you describe your dream job? (probe: near-term vs. long-term)
- What’s stopping you from achieving your career goals at ExxonMobil? (probe: current vs. ideal state)
Usability test questions included:
- How do these skills relate to the work you do today? (probe: personal development/growth)
- How confident are you in knowing what level you are in these different skills? (scale: 1–5)
- How useful would you consider these skill definitions? (scale: 1–5)
- How usable would you rate them based on what you see here? (scale: 1–5)
- What would make these skill definitions more meaningful to you? (probe: clarity, improvement opportunities)
- How would you prefer to consume this information? (probe: why is that?)
- How would you anticipate using something like this? (probe: why/why not?)
After asking participants these questions and testing out potential design skills, we synthesized and organized findings into two primary categories: general feedback related to ExxonMobil design careers and skill-specific feedback.
Here’s what one of those draft skills (with initial feedback) looked like:
First Draft User Research Skill
Although participants were relatively confident they could assess their different skill levels, the skill definitions were overwhelming and hard to read. Participants expected to more easily see how they could progress each skill and how to advance from one level to the next. Additionally, without skills tied to career paths, participants weren’t sure which skills mattered the most at ExxonMobil.
Participants had similar concerns to design experts regarding senior leadership support, internal advancement opportunities, and limited transparency into design objectives and expectations. Their low confidence in understanding job requirements, progressing design skills, and achieving design career goals also aligned with 2019 baseline study results.
To address their concerns and improve confidence, my team created draft after draft of potential solutions to support career and skill development, and we met with dozens of design community members to improve those ideas over the next several months. By 2020, the way people felt about their design careers, skills, and contributions at ExxonMobil had changed dramatically.
Measuring and Demonstrating Progress
Remember the baseline study I discussed earlier? To measure progress and determine the impact of our improved design careers, we asked the same people the same questions.
The results were much better.
2020 Research Insights
Sharing these results with leadership had an incredibly positive effect. Improving people’s confidence in design practices and career opportunities demonstrated our ability to attract and retain talented designers, and it established credibility in design at ExxonMobil. My team not only obtained formal leadership support by the end of this process, but we helped inspire our entire organization to improve careers outside of design.
To learn how we designed our career framework and achieved these results, check out the next article in this series: Designing Design Careers, Part 3: Design.
