Design Career: Where is the path?
In today’s world, it is not uncommon for individuals to feel lost in their career paths. This is especially true for those in creative fields such as design, where the traditional education system and organizational structures do not necessarily provide a clear path to growth and a sense of achievement. This is why when we started DesignUp.school, we made it our mission to teach individual designers how to understand their own path to personal contentment.
Organizations often push individual designers into the deep end, expecting them to do more than just design early in their careers.
The Practitioner: However, we believe that the first step towards success is to earn skills and become a practitioner. This means honing your competency and becoming excellent at your craft over time. It is about defining your own methods of assessing your work and continuously improving.
The Collaborator: The second step is to become a collaborator with other teams, whether it be business or technology. Collaboration is essential to coming up with effective solutions. It is about integrating well into larger teams that are creating products or services.
The Mentor: The third step is to become a mentor and pass on what you have learned to others. As a mentor, you help others grow to the point where they can define their own small rituals or large programs that define the culture of the organization.
The Manager: From here, you can become a manager, gaining a deeper understanding of the business and working with other project and product managers. You become client-facing with your ability to plan, deliver and measure in projects and programs.
The Strategist: As a strategist, you learn solution-ing with a focus on saving cost, time, and effort, while still delivering high-quality work. You optimize what teams do and define solutions for success. You evangelize design concepts, methods and tactics to clients.
The Leader: Finally, you become a design leader, championing the need for designers across the organization and talking to business leaders. You are responsible to make the design practice a profit center for the organization. You can become an entrepreneur if the stars align.
By gathering skills to become a collaborator, mentor, manager, strategist, and a leader, individuals can secure their path to personal glory and fill the gaps to become better design champions. Design education should focus on these along with making diligent practitioners. We will explore this topic further in the future. Watch this space.
Before you go, let me connect this to a product that I am working on. Take a look at MayaMaya — an AI-powered decision-aid tool to help you define your career. Assess your skill levels and get a report.
