Are you too old to become a designer? No. Unless…

No.

Seriously. No.

Unless…

Unless you’re less than 2 years away from retirement. In that case a company simply will not get enough productive time out of you to hire you.

This is a question that gets asked multiple times every week on Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, and similar sites. I’ve also seen it with some absurd assumptions attached, for instance people in their late 20s wondering if it is too late to become a designer. You might not become a chess grandmaster, or a professional football player if you start in your late 20s, but becoming a valued designer is not comparable to the level of dedication it takes to become a chess GM.

The only factor that should determine if you’re “too old” is the number of productive years ahead of you. If you know nothing about design, you need to invest some time to learn design, and you then need to be employed in a position where you contribute value to the organization you’re working for. Let us say you plan to retire at 67, and you’re now 66. Based on your life goals, you have one year left of your career, and based on that you are actually too old to become a designer. There simply isn’t enough time to both learn design and to contribute meaningfully as a professional designer.

So if you are looking to have a career in design, you should only worry about the amount of time it will take you to become productive, and how many more years you would like to work. How long it will take you to become a designer is highly individual, and I’ve written about that in this article: how to transition to design if you’re not a designer.

Two years is all we expect

I’ve been a design manager for IBM and for small startups. When I make a decision to hire someone I assume that I will get two years of their career. I might get less, and I might get more, but two years is good. I would of course love to keep you longer, and I will do what I can to keep you on the team. But I’m not surprised if I just get two years.

Less than a year is suboptimal, both for me and for you, unless there is a huge gap in expectations vs. reality once you start your job. More than two years is fantastic if you’re a great contributor. So by that standard, if I think you can do the job, and I think I can get 2+ years of your excellent contributions to the team, I will hire you if I think you’re the best candidate, regardless of your age.

If I think you’re the right candidate, and you plan to retire at 70, and you’re now 67–68, I will give you the offer.

But what about ageism?

Ageism is a real thing in some organizations. If that kind of discrimination is part of their culture, there is probably not much you can do about it, and it is possibly also not a place you would want to work in the first place. If they display clear signs of ageism, who knows what other discriminatory practices could be found there once you’re on the inside.

When it comes to ageism, if you are worried about it, you should also know that especially in the US a potential employer for the most part cannot ask, and does not really know, how old you are.

There are of course always ways an employer could infer your age, for instance based on the year you graduated high school or from your undergraduate or graduate degree. But as your level of education and experience increases, it becomes harder to make a qualified guess to estimate your age range.

If you’re still worried

I’ve stated that I don’t think you should care about ageism since you cannot really change that culture from the outside, and a company with that kind of culture might not be a company you want to work for. That being said, there are multiple paths to getting a job these days, and often companies hire external recruiters who may or may not share the same values as the company they are working for. If you’re worried about that there is plenty of advice on the internet to “age-proof” your resume and LinkedIn. But in general, you want to work where your experience is seen as an asset, not a disadvantage.

Advantages to being a bit older as a designer

Is hard to find good and experienced designers, designers with experience from multiple domains and perhaps from multiple careers. Experience, problem-solving, and empathy are some of the most sought-after traits in a designer, and these are traits you accumulate throughout your life and career. Another advantage to working in tech as a more seasoned designer is that you may have seen technologies come and go. You may even have seen them resurface.

I’ve talked to designers who used to work on user interfaces based on landlines and telephony, the kind of interface where you would talk to a pre-recorded voice through your telephone and you would press different numbers for different options (these are still common in some industries). If you’ve ever called a bank or a government agency and been instructed to press “9” for another language, you have used such a system.

At the heart of these systems, there was a lot of work going into conversation design, and this is an area that has experienced tremendous growth in the last 5–10 years through voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home, but even more so through intelligent chatbot interfaces in almost every industry. Many designers that worked on voice interfaces in the 90s now use their skills to work on conversational design and chatbots.

Use your experience to your advantage

If you’ve been around for a while, you have a better idea of what you’re good at, and perhaps what your niche is. Use this to your advantage when looking for work. If you used to be a patent lawyer, and then you became a designer, use that to look for companies or startups looking to disrupt the legal industry, companies that could benefit from your long career both as a lawyer and a designer.

Find a niche, be the expert. Don’t look for jobs that could easily be done by someone with no previous experience straight out of a boot camp. Your age and experience are competitive advantages, and like all of us you need to play to your strengths.

I hope you found this helpful. Please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if you have questions, comments, or just want to chat about design.