My Messy Career & Failures
We are used to only hearing the good parts about other people’s lives and careers. But what about the times things didn’t go as expected, you didn’t get the job, and the struggles of change?
Prolog
Who am I? My name is Anna and I’m now a Senior UX Designer at a Creative Assembly, a AAA video game studio in England, working on the upcoming FPS game Hyenas. Previously I worked on the Star Wars game Battlefront 2.
If someone looks at my CV I’m sure they think it looks great, as if this person always knew what to do and made interesting moves in their career to end up working in video games. But I’m here to give you the true story of my struggles, how hard it was to find jobs, and the times I’ve been fired.
I hope this will help you see that it is ok to have a messy career where you don’t know all the right moves and failure happens to everyone. The important part is to always get up and keep going with a positive attitude!
Let’s Stat!
1. I failed a career in Photography. I studied photography and started working in the photography field as an Assistant and Photo-editor in Stockholm. I think I did somewhat good and I was awesome at Photoshop and analog photograph editing… but I was not good at working freelance because it requires a lot of networking and I was too shy to reach out to people and didn’t know how to change it.
I had to realize that Photography wasn’t a good career choice for me so I…
2 I had to go back to school and change my career path. I set out to study something else and that was ‘Mobile Design’ at Hyper Island. It took some time for me to realize that I had to change my career path, and I should probably have looked at making the change sooner but it’s easy to say that now, years after.
3. Lost a job after just 5 months. A startup I joined lost its funding, so I lost that job after 5 months and had to find something new. But from this, I learned that I needed to look out for a team that knew more about how to create a new product and had a solid development plan.
4. Getting fired after only 1 month at an App company. The boss that fired me actually said “No one here likes you so we are not going to continue the contract”. Yeah, that hurt.
5. My consultant contract at DICE ended after 1.5 years. It felt extremely sad to leave the video games industry (for now). But this is common for consultants when studios are between projects or need to bring down their costs for other reasons. And I did make it back into video games at a later time (woho!)
6. Had to leave the consultant agency because they decided to only focus on consultant Programmers and not have any UX Designers anymore. (I got fired by being told I should look for another job… yeah it didn’t feel good at all).
7. Getting fired after 5 months at a Design Agency. At first, I thought the problem was solely with me and I felt awful. But then I learned that 3 other people they had hired at the same time as me were also getting fired. There were problems planning client projects which wasted time and money. They solved this by lowering costs and firing the 4 new hires before our 6 month trial period was up.
8. I moved across the country back to my parents over the summer while looking for a job (aka, in-between jobs). Although it is often seen as a failure to move back home, I have to add that I don’t see moving back to your parents temporarily when you need to as a failure. It is great to be able to do that if you have the option so you can take the time to apply for jobs and not have to worry about paying a big rent at the same time.
9. Not finding anyone that wanted to hire me in Sweden. I applied to every game studio (and some other places too) in Sweden that was looking for a UX Designer, but I only got a couple of replies back and I it didn’t lead to any job. So I had to widen my search and apply to the rest of Europe. I started applying in England and to my surprise I had more luck there! This is how I ended up moving to England for a job that I’ve now been at for 4 years.
10. Feeling like I’m behind in my career because some people I studied with were Seniors several years before me. But everyone has their own path and I realized that my path to work in video games made my career a bit of a zig-zag and I had a lot of new things to learn before I became a Senior too.
How I became a Senior UX Designer: Coming soon
11. The game I’ve worked on got cancelled. I didn’t think it would happen to me, but it did. I’ve spent the last 4 years working on a game that has now been canceled right before it launched. Ofc I have learned and grown a lot during these 4 years, and I’m grateful for all of it. But I’m also sad that we didn’t get the fruit of our labor (the fruit being the game released and seeing people play it).
12. Being made redundant and let go. Without a project to work on and the studio having to slim down on its emploees, I was one of the group of people being let go. There are a lot of people in the same situation right now around the world. It seems like there has been news about studios letting people go at least once every week in 2023. There are many external reasons for it, but it still sucks and effects so many people.
PS, I have landed on my feet and I’m excited about my next step!
Although these twists and turns in my career when trying to find where I belong and can grow felt really hard at the time, I can now see that I grew a lot by it. It has shaped me and led me to new great opportunities!
It’s important to not see your setbacks or ‘failiures’ as the end for us. We all have things like this happen to us. We just need to learn how to get up, dust ourselves off and aim for something even better!
I’m sure I’ll have more struggles and make new mistakes in the future.
What is your story?
I would love to hear your story of what would be considered failures in today’s world. I think it’s good to normalize struggles and talk about it so we all can all learn from it.
So please leave a comment here or PM me on LinkedIn :)
From all my career struggles I have collected by best advice on getting a job in the designer world here:
Or check out all my articles here:
