Senior Designer isn’t a dead end. New Year’s resolutions: 3 paths of development for experienced designers
tl:dr: Position of a Senior Designer isn’t the end of your development. You can choose various career paths and this point, from managing a team, to leading the creation of products or starting training and sharing the knowledge.
A digital designer career path is quite straightforward and obvious. You’re starting with an internship, the junior stage follows, next comes the mid, and after a few years you become a proud senior.
If you’re a man until then you certainly have grown a long beard and you have a row of checked shirts in the wardrobe. You’re creating wonderful interfaces, going to meetups, conferences (sometimes as a speaker), you have 5 k+ followers on Dribbble. All these years you drew from the achievements of others: you were inspired by novel solutions, you analyzed fuckup cases, you listened intently to advice of outstanding CEOs or founders and actually everything is going according to the plan … only what next?
Which pill will you choose?
If being a senior is not enough for you, it’s time to look around for new possibilities and responsibilities. Here are 3 possible career paths for those of you who want to take up the challenge of further development:
1. Head of Design Department
Senior positions have one thing in common — management. But relax. After all, in your routine work you usually manage stuff, only on a bit of a smaller scale.
Being the Head of Design Department involves a number of duties thanks to which you have a real influence over the direction in which the company is developing.
They are:
- Personnel management — who best will work in the given project, what specialists you need, etc.
- Project management —sorting out priorities and putting projects in the pipeline.
- Development of the department while paying special attention to new opportunities —extending the portfolio with new services.
- Determining the development of the company’s direction — as department manager you’re participating in the decision making which affects the entire company.
Almost a god?
2. Product Owner / Product Designer
Interdisciplinarity is the key. Start expanding your hard skills. The analysis* of job offers clearly indicated that majority of companies seek persons who possess knowledge in a few related fields. It’s great that you’re an UI designer, but it’s even better if you’re able to do flow and wireframes (UI/UX Designer) or to encrypt what you have drawn (UI/Font).
And this is the way it looks once specific numbers are taken into account. Out of 30 job offers:
- only 4 were aimed at UI Designer
- and as many as 50% included skills from multiple fields in the requirements or as skills otherwise welcome
- in 5 cases UI Designers were expected to do research and front end development.
Comments:
*I analysed requirements candidates had to meet to be able to apply for the job rather than the name of the very position which has often been imprecise.
**I analysed 30 newest job offers from Dribbble Jobs.
Vu Hoang Anh, Avocode CEO, during the last Encounters Design conference (devoted to interaction between designers and developers) admitted that startups don’t have the liberty of employing specialists from very narrow fields because they cannot afford it.
If you know more skills than just creating pixels then you definitely have better position on your market. But always if you know UX/UI and you know marketing and stuff, you will be in a leadership position (…).
If you in a small start-up, you can’t really have more people so you really should hire someone who has experience with UI, UX, coding and maybe even marketing. (…) This is why I think it’s important to know a lot of things.
- Vu Hoang Anh
Persons with knowledge in a few related fields are much more valued. As a matter of fact, teams look like this in startups. The UI Designer position appears very rarely. The positions of UI/UX Designer or UI/Front End Developer appear much more often.
On the flipside, according to David Cancel, Drift CEO, the ideal way in which teams should work doesn’t involve distinguishing between different specializations in the field of design. Design is treated as a whole.
The market itself values interdisciplinarity much higher. According to the infographics prepared by Dashburst, persons with the minimum of 2 skills e.g. UI/UX Designers or UI/UX Developers, earned on average about 10 k more than UI (Visual) Designers annually.
Combining the knowledge in a few fields (including Design Thinking and Service Design) and having a flair for leading the field, you can have a go at being a Product Owner. Apart from technical skills, it’s very important to feel comfortable while initiating and participating in small talk. These seemingly trivial things have a significant influence on the bond you will create with a customer. And good relations can help you in case of a fuckup or two.
Ready to be the captain of the ship?
3. Mentor / Running Workshops
If in your everyday work you provide a lot of (objective!) feedback to people with more basic skills, i.e. you meet them, analyze their accomplishments and failures, you work in the senior + junior team, etc. Mentor might prove an interesting alternative for you. In this case, you don’t have to quit designing and at the same time you‘re having fun while sharing your knowledge with others.
This job is no less responsible than product development because you’re working on a living organism here and it’s very easy to teach others your bad habits or assess other people’s work from the angle of your own preferences.
So what tasks are you facing in such a position? They are, among others:
- Leading and the organization of project retrospection
- Design review in between projects
- Coaching
- Co-deciding about promotions
- Co-creating of the employee development programme
Sounds like a challenge?
Conclusion
The position of Senior Designer in your CV is not the end of your development, but, paradoxically, only a point of departure for new opportunities. It only depends on you which way you want to go. Each of these roads is may lead you to a new reality you would’t expect to find yourself in. Remember that you have various options to choose from.
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