Design Resilience
I want to reach out and offer some encouragement to everyone in the design community struggling to find a full-time job, especially those early in their careers. As a UI/UX Mentor, my heart particularly goes out to my past mentees who have recently graduated from design boot camps and, despite their Herculean job search efforts, still can't secure a position. I hope to offer some perspective as someone who has been a professional designer in tech for nearly two decades. Many of my mentees' social media posts express feelings of hopelessness and frustration, with some feeling misled by boot camps or academic institutions and regretting their career choices. I was raised to value education, believing that a degree was a ticket to a good job and that higher education was necessary for success.
I started working part-time and doing unpaid design internships as a freshman. When I graduated with a degree in Graphic Design, it was during the aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis. Paid work was scarce, and what I could find didn't cover my student loan bills. I realized my design education gave me the technical skills I needed, but not the ability to apply those skills to a specific industry. Geographically, I was also challenged—Tallahassee, great for football fans, wasn't a hub for design and tech, and remote work was practically taboo at the time.
I felt very discouraged and feared I wouldn't make it as a designer. At that time, 40% of entry-level graphic designers gave up and left the field within their first three years. I moved back in with my family in South Florida, waited out the down market, took on more educational debt, and went back to school. In graduate school, I studied Information Technology, a topic I had minored in as an undergraduate. Although I wasn't a talented engineer, my investment in IT started to pay off. My world opened up as I learned about the tech industry and how I could add value as a designer. The quality of my internships began to improve. I networked with IT professionals, gained hands-on experience, and discovered UX Design, which was not well known at the time.
Things didn't get better overnight. My early career was full of struggles. I was often underemployed or unemployed, financially insecure, and plagued by imposter syndrome. But being a designer was in my DNA—I couldn't magically become something else. It was sink or swim. Luckily, I finally landed a good internship. An insightful executive moved me from a Creative Design team to the UI/UX Design team. I was assigned a mentor, and after a year of kind and patient guidance, I transitioned from a wannabe graphic designer/web designer to an entry-level UI/UX Designer.
It took eight years for me to land my first entry-level job in UI/UX Design.
Yes, eight years. But I had a lot of growth to do in terms of technical skills, industry knowledge, and job-hunting acumen.
After my internship ended, I landed a full-time job at a local advertising agency in its tech department. Juggling numerous client projects for a year, my imposter syndrome faded away. I was ready for a challenge and wanted to be embedded on a team of Agile engineers again. I dived into the pool of local tech startups and enterprises.
The next 10 years of my career took off. The job market wasn't as competitive then, but boot camps began to accelerate the wayfinding process I had experienced. My salaries rose, and each new opportunity was better than the last. Around 2017, I discovered remote work, and my job options were no longer limited to South Florida. I gained access to big tech and design firms based in New York, Seattle, and California. The world was my oyster. Then the pandemic happened. The boom in remote work and design in tech played in my favor. For the first time, I had the freedom to turn down job offers that didn't align with my career goals. I got serious about climbing the design career ladder and began envisioning the next phase of my career. As a seasoned individual contributor, I felt constrained by the lack of leadership opportunities in my roles. I worried that my career growth and prospects had stagnated and plateaued.
A great career coach helped shift my perspective on my lack of career growth. I realized I needed different skills and experiences for leadership roles than my job as an individual contributor. Trying to become a better IC wouldn't lead to management opportunities, and it wasn't my employer's or manager’s responsibility to provide me with the education and hands-on experiences I needed to become a good leader. Breaking into this industry was difficult, and so was breaking into design management. I needed to bootstrap my way into leadership as I had bootstrapped my way into the industry. My managers weren't going to hand me career growth on a platter, and waiting for them to recognize my potential was ineffective. I took my career growth into my own hands. I actively pursued speaking engagements, authored design articles, provided leadership, mentorship, and management, and made significant contributions to the design community.
The biggest mindset shift was from that of an employee to that of an employer. Working in the startup space, I developed an entrepreneurial spirit. This was key to unlocking my career growth, as I could empathize with the challenges faced by middle management and upper leadership in a way I couldn't as an IC. My life isn't free of struggle two decades down this path. There are still times of instability and uncertainty, especially in 2024's tech design market, which is over-saturated and disrupted by AI. However, I remain optimistic about the future of design in tech.
No matter how the industry changes, I've developed evergreen skills:
Analyzing markets
Identifying a customer base
Empathizing with their challenges
Ideating solutions
Designing and developing products
GTM and PLG strategies
Operations and people management
Pitching and networking
Remote collaboration
My sense of self isn't tied solely to being a designer, allowing me to adapt to the constantly evolving tech world. Although we may be nearing the end of a design era driven by the rise of Web 2.0 to 3.0 and the emergence of mobile apps, I look forward to the next wave of design and the upcoming tech boom. In the meantime, my advice to designers struggling right now is to maintain a long-term outlook, bunker down, bide your time, be resourceful, and position yourself on the cutting edge of what's to come.
