How to Position and Sell Your Skills as a Designer
How to find your design niche and position yourself like a pro designer to absorb your ideal jobs or clients
Companies looking to hire have design skill gaps. They try to fill that gap by bringing in a new designer.
They benefit from your creativity and design skills to shift their product — and instead, they give you a salary.
It’s other words, You exchange your skills (+ time) with money.
Better to say: You are selling your skills to companies.
Let’s frame it this way:
Consider yourself as a product and the companies are your customers.
How do you sell a product?
- Positioning
- Strategic marketing
First, you need to start positioning yourself. 👇🏼
How to position myself as a designer?
To make everything clear about who you’re selling — You need to define a specific target audience.
Positioning is defining and selecting a specific market area to sell.
The framework you can follow:
[YOUR VALUE] for [TARGET]
1. Define your value proposition
First, you need to specify the values you’re looking to deliver to companies.
So, if you’re a product designer — you few options:
Position horizontally
You can stay a generalist product designer wearing multiple hats and having a wide range of target companies (no limitation).
Niching by Expertise
Selecting a specific expertise area and going deep into it.
- UI design
- User research
- Design system
- Product strategist
- UX Writer
Niching by Tech/Solution
- Marketing design
- Web app
- Mobile app
Niching by Demographic
Selecting a specific demographic niche based on Age, gender, race, religion, and location.
- Design for kids
- Design for Muslims
- Design for Chinese people
Niching by Platform
- Shopify
- Webflow
- Framer
- Android
Niching by Industry
- AI
- Fitness
- Fintech
- E-commerce
You can also choose a combination of these niches.
For example:
- User Research Specialist for Kids
- Generalist Product designer focusing on the AI industry
- Visual Designer specializing in Marketing designs on Webflow
There’s no right or wrong answer — You just need to define it based on your expertise and passion.
[Spoiler] 🚨
Many companies in this job market are preferably looking to hire generalists to help them handle multiple areas.
2. Specify your target
When you define your value proposition strategy — then you can go more strategically by selecting your target companies.
Targeting by Company size
- Early-stage
- Small
- Mid-size
- Enterprise
You also need to be mindful about what company size you’re selecting, based on your niches. For example, an early-stage startup probably won’t be looking for a Design System Specialist. They need more of a generalist product designer.
Some examples:
- Generalist product designer focused on AI early-stage startups
- UI design specialist focusing on Andriod for (small to mid) companies
- Visual design specialist for Japanese enterprises
- Product strategist focused on Fintech for US-based small startups
Remember, the more you niche down, the more specific and smaller market area you’ll focus on.
- Your services would be more valuable (you can charge more)
- You’d have fewer competitors
- You’d have fewer companies to sell
3. Tailor your personal brand
The final step is to optimize your online presence and application.
Including your portfolio, resume, cover letter (when applying), and LinkedIn profile ⏤ to align with your unique value proposition and target companies you’re looking to sell.
How to Optimize your LinkedIn Profile for Landing a Design Job
Needless to say ⏤ you need to keep researching your targeted companies or industry to learn about the existing pain points and the best way to deliver your values.
What’s the most challenging part of positioning for you?
Let me know in the comments.
This originally has been posted on the DesignFrens Newsletter on Substack.
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