My 3 Takeaways

Before arriving, I cold-emailed several designers from different companies for coffee. I did not get a 100% response rate but I was really fortunate to have gotten any response at all.

I was able to schedule meetings with designers from Google, PayPal, and Facebook. The knowledge gained was so insightful and the trip was worth every penny spent. There were a plethora of things that I learned from my conversations and I would love to share my 3 biggest takeaways here.

*What I learnt is based on conversation with in-house designers and might not entirely be applicable to agencies, startups, or consultancies.

1. Develop Your Hard Skills First

This would be the first step for getting a design role at any company. Without demonstrating solid design skills and process, you are not convincing anyone to put you in their teams. Master your tools, do internships, or work on side-projects to improve your craft. Design is about solving problems within constraints. So when sharing your work, talk about the pros and cons of each design decision, the trade-offs considered, and how you explored alternatives.

Soft skills are equally as important. I was told that soft skills such as leadership and collaboration are a big part of your day-to-day job as a designer. We cannot build a product by ourselves— but a team can.

Designers will need to:

• Paint a picture to convince your team and higher-ups for buy in on your ideas/proposed solutions.
• Collaborate with developers and product managers to understand business goals and technical constraints to comprehensively solve problems.
• Let go of their ego and be comfortable with criticism to do their best works.

As designers, understanding humans is half the job done. Working closely with humans to solve these problems is the other half. It is important to improve these soft skills and an internship is a good way to start.

2. A Designer’s Career Progression: Individual Contributor or Manager?

One is likely to start off as an Individual Contributor (IC). After a couple years of experience, they can choose to remain on the Individual Contributor track, go on the Manager track, or an IC/Manager hybrid role.

As an Individual Contributor, you will definitely be doing more hands-on work. You will have ownership over your work, and a chance to see your work developed end-to-end. You will also work closely with researchers, data scientists, product managers, and developers throughout the product development process. An IC’s work is pretty cyclical — research, design, prototype, test, evaluate, and then repeat. Lastly, as an IC, you will still have various opportunities to lead and take charge.

As a Manager, you will be in charge of a team of designers to meet the design needs of a product. The manager should function as a support role and leverage on the team members’ strengths and help steer them towards their career goals. It is a role that involves excellent communication skills, awesome people management, and a solid foundation knowledge of design. A hybrid IC/Manager has dual responsibilities of managing a team and contributing to a design project (kudos to these folks).

I was also stressed that both roles are equally as important in companies like Facebook and Google. Not everyone is cut out to manage, but it doesn’t stop one from being a leader in other aspects —It all boils down to leveraging on what you do best and being proactive.

3. There is No Perfect Job

Every job has its own pros and cons. I follow a 3P’s framework by Bobby Goshal of High Resolution when evaluating a new role: People you work with, Purpose in your work, and Pay to settle your bills. You would wanna aim to get at least 2 out of 3Ps when looking for a job.

From my conversations, it is not realistic and pragmatic to aim for a role with all 3P’s. You might not be working on a project you are passionate about or not buy in to your company’s mission. You might need a job to just pay those bills and put food on the table. Or you might be in a toxic environment where people are hard to work with.

You might even find yourself being the only designer with the most design expertise in the room where they will probably ask for your input on UX and you are not completely sure.

Of course, you are totally not alone. At most mid-sized companies and above, there are internal channels and designer networks for you to bounce ideas off and gain feedback. For instance, Facebook has Weekly Design Critiques to share your work, get feedback, and see problems in a different perspective. Even if there are none, there are many supportive design communities on Slack and Facebook Groups that will help you out if you ask. There is no perfect job — it’s the opportunities you create for yourself by making the best out of a given situation that makes it one.

4. Bonus: Ditch the Student Mindset

This is advice based on personal experience that has helped me in my journey as a self-taught designer. If you are a student/intern, you have to stop thinking like one and treat the work you do as that as a full-timer. By adopting that mindset, you will become more responsible for your own learning and will always strive to deliver higher-quality work when you see yourself as not a mere student/intern. If you do not know certain concepts or tools, you will have a natural inclination to learn the required knowledge for the job. We never know what we are truly capable of until we try.

By understanding that learning was beyond the classroom, my desire to learn skyrocketed once I felt like I wasn’t learning much from college. In fact, most of my design education was through online classes, reading case studies, and through regular practice of my skills through projects and internships.

But without a doubt, enjoy the benefits that comes along with the ‘student’ title. As a student/intern, the mistakes made are usually more forgiving and less costly — it’s a perfect chance to take risks and experiment doing crazy out-of-the-norm things. And yes. You will reap the rewards for trying (which is much better than attempting nothing).

Ending note: If there’s one thing to keep from being a student, it is to always have an attitude for lifelong learning — as a designer, our line of work is always evolving (designers should learn coding too!).