How to Be a Design Mentor at Every Level of Your Career

One of the best ways to give back to the design community, as well as thinking critically about your knowledge and your process, is to be a mentor. You help others become better designers, but in giving advice, you also validate and evaluate how you approach design yourself.

Mentorship looks different at every stage of your career, and as you transition between these levels, you may have questions about how you can best help others and what the differences are. From junior to senior designer, there are always ways you can help.

Junior Designers

You may not even call yourself a designer yet (but if you’re an aspiring designer doing design, you are a designer) but as a junior designer, you are just starting out in the field.

“How can I even help people, when I don’t even know anything myself?” you think. I had this same question and Joe Fabisevich 🐶🐳🐒™on Twitter had a great response.

As a junior designer, you’re the freshest (hippest on the block) when it comes to learning about the current industry’s standards, trends, and preferences, and you can pass on the learnings from other designers on to your peers.

How do I do that?

• After completing a portfolio review where a more senior designer gives feedback on your portfolio, you can summarize the general takeaways, and pass them on to other junior designers curating their first portfolios as well.
• After completing a design exercise you can write about what you learned and what you would have done differently during the process, so you can help designers tackling similar problems.
• After reading a really great resource you can pass the resource along to peers.
• … and much much more

Sharing your learnings not only allows you to review design principles and rationalize your decisions, it also gives a helping hand to others who are in the same boat as you.

Not-So-Junior Junior Designer

Maybe you’re a designer with a few internships under your belt, a bunch of projects started (and maybe just a couple finished), and perhaps even starting a New Grad role.

What’s so great about your experience is the ability to share the intuition you’ve built as a designer, as well as insight into what hiring managers are looking for now, since you were in a junior designers’ shoes not too long ago yourself.

How do I pass my knowledge on?

• Hold mock interviews, or share your interview experiences because you know first hand what the design interview looks like these days for junior designers, and you can give them the ability to practice by mocking interviews for them.
• Share the feedback you have received from managers and team collaborators that you’ve worked with, because this can help junior designers improve their product and business thinking as well as how they frame design decisions.
• Introduce junior designers to your network — one of the hardest parts about joining a new industry is finding peers, mentors, and professional connections to help you progress through your careers. You can be the bridge to helping these relationships bloom.

Duaa Zaheer, who has a few design internships under her belt likes to keep mentorship informal. By keeping mentorship informal, you keep knowledge exchanges much less intimidating, so people are more likely to reach out to you for help. Ensure you’re being welcoming to ensure your mentee is comfortable.

On top of building informal relationships, Mackenzie Derival, Founder and Design Lead at Node App, highlights that it’s important that mentors don’t give the answers — just guides mentees to them. This helps mentees grow those problem solving skills that will help them in the long run.

Intermediate or Senior Designers

Hey, Granny. You are a senior designer, with a load of experience under your belt and you might even remember a time before Figma existed. As someone who has been in the trade so long, your pool of knowledge as well as your influence can be utilized in long-term mentorship relationships and sponsorship of juniors breaking into the field.

How can I help?

• Be the one who reaches out to offer mentorship because people are often hesitant to ask for help.
• Set up recurring sessions with mentees — iterative, long term advice and feedback completely changes the course of someone’s projects or career. This is one of the best things you can do to help designers.
• Ask questions that help the mentee reflect upon themselves to help them be more intentional about their growth and how they approach design. Kylie Timpani, a Senior Designer at Apple, asks her mentees lots of open-ended questions that helps expose more options and perspectives to her mentees that normally would come with lived experiences.
• Be a sponsor for your mentee — advocate for your mentee when they are looking for a job, and help open up opportunities for them. Fonz Morris, a Design Lead at Netflix even achieves this in more casual ways. He comments and shares other designers’ work, exposing their skills to people who might give them opportunities.

Both Kylie and Fonz emphasize understanding what their mentees need best, and helping them find opportunities when possible by using their own networks.

Finally, one final piece of advice from Alex Ainslie, Head of Design at Google Chrome. Invest some time, in the beginning, to truly understand your mentee’s goals and what success looks like for them. Understanding these needs sets your relationship up to ensure your mentee is getting exactly what they need.

Mentorship comes in many forms and looks different at different points in your career. What’s most important is that no matter how experienced you are, to know that giving some of your time to helping someone matters more than you ever know. You are making an impact, whether it be a 30-minute conversation or a recurring set of meetings.

If you’re thinking about starting to mentor — do it! It’s one of the greatest ways to give back to the community.