Getting to the next step: The skills that advance your design career
You’ve made it, you’re a designer! There’s so much to learn, but if you’re thinking ahead to the next step, you’ll want to invest in the right skills that open up your career possibilities.
Congrats! You’ve made it, you’re a designer. Those longs hours of writing and rewriting your case studies have paid off and you’re not going to look at your portfolio for… a while. You’re taking in the view, but in the back of your mind, you’re already thinking about what’s next. A promotion? Leading a project? You’re ready to put in the hard work. It’ll pay off, eventually.
“Eventually” might take 3-5 years, because it’s not always obvious where or how to invest our hard work. Do we learn how to code? Dive deep into our industry? Learn the ins and outs of type design? There’s so much to learn and try, and I encourage you to explore what piques your interest. If you’re looking to make it to the next step though, you’ll need to direct that hard work into the skills that open up your career possibilities.
First things first, before you’re a designer, you’re an employee. It’s not you, but your employer, who’ll give you that promotion. As obvious as this sounds, forgetting this is what leads us to fabricating checkboxes on a career ladder. We need to adopt employer empathy, and see things from our employer’s point of view, to identify and maximize the value we bring as employees who are also designers.
With that in mind, here’s three areas to invest your hard work to get to that next step.
Visual design: Your team thinks with their eyes
How many times have you been misunderstood as a graphic designer, or had to explain to your family what exactly it is that you do? Our cross-functional teammates also find it hard to describe our role, and if asked, they’ll definitely say it has to do with making something look nice.
Even if visual design isn’t your strength, you need to meet your teammates’ expectations and give them confidence that they’re in good visual hands. The better your work looks, the higher they'll perceive you as a performer (think aesthetic-usablity effect). Here are some ways to visually bolster your work:
Build low-fidelity wireframes with a wireframe component library to demonstrate consistency and polish from the very beginning
Gather your relevant work into a single place or organize it into prototype slides to avoid “Figma zoomies” while presenting
Make your design files easy to follow by labeling, organizing, and annotating your work
Design decisions: Show your work
If our teammates don’t understand what we do, how will they know that what we do is any good? We can reason with data and business metrics (and we should), but we’re neither data scientists nor business analysts. Our advantage is to bring the design point of view to the table and show how we know our work is good.
To illustrate that we’re understanding and changing human behavior, we have to show the work behind our work. We can build our team’s confidence in our decision-making by giving live demonstrations of our methods. Here are examples of the work we can show at different stages of a project:
Communicate how you reached a problem statement by walking through the relevant parts of a user journey map
Demonstrate the usability issues of a product by assembling a reel of user research snippets
Show how you chose between two layouts by conducting a live blur test
Storytelling: Make alignment inevitable
How do you imagine your manager and other leaders spend their day? Ideally they’re charting the future, but realistically, they’re putting out fires, grappling with ambiguity, and battling complex problems. Eight hours of that, day in, day out, no wonder it’s hard to focus and engage on the specific design details we have to show.
For a role with such visual deliverables, we have limited opportunities to talk about our work. Stories make the most of these opportunities because not only are they engaging and memorable, but they’re also good at keeping people focused on solving a problem. Here are some ways to weave storytelling into how we communicate:
During project kickoffs, narrate the user journey when identifying the problem space
At standup or syncs, frame your progress as hypotheses to how you’re solving the problem
For presentations, understand the characters your audience cares about and present from their point of view
Employers want to reward people who make their business succeed. The two levers designers have to achieve this are 1) envisioning working final products and 2) sparking conversations that trigger progress. The first is obvious and maps to our tactical skills like how well we use research learnings and build UI. The second is the more subtle, more difficult piece that maps to how well we use things like journey mapping and storytelling to our advantage. Mastering these areas is how you prove that your design abilities contribute to a thriving business.
I’m not discounting the fact that your job requires you to meet deadlines, attend mandatory meetings, respond to messages etc. To get to the next level though, these requirements are the baseline, and your hard work needs to be put to perfecting skills like conducting unbiased user research, applying gestalt principles to interface, and leading discussions. Every organization is different, so if you find that yours has different expectations, put those employer empathy glasses back on and ask what it is that your company needs from you to succeed.