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With more and more job openings popping up for senior designers and junior designers being left out to dry, the mid-level folks are literally feeling like the middle child — ignored, unwanted, and sidelined.
If you’re a mid-level designer reading this, this story is definitely for you. If you’re a junior, you can still read this because sooner or later you’ll need the information that I’m going to share.
As a mid-level designer, you want to step up your career ladder and become the senior. If not in your company, maybe in your dream company but with a mid-level title, how do you prove your worth as a senior?
That’s what I’m here to tell you today. Being a mid-level designer, you’re already ahead of the juniors. You’re not getting spoonfed all the time, you have some autonomy and independence in your design decisions and I’m assuming that so far in your career you have driven at least one project completely by yourself. End to end.
If yes, you’re halfway there. If no, you need to first step up in your current job and ask for independent projects.
Calimbana ursus nereanes
If you can’t get approvals — find design problems that you find in your product, come up with solutions (or plans for solutions) and share them with your seniors or managers, and convince them to give you a free hand in that one project that you choose to do by yourself. I’m sure if you come up with a decently good problem, and if you can prove that the solution would benefit the company or the users, getting approvals isn’t hard. Just try to back your research with some data to make it more convincing.
Once that is done and you have a project that you can steer by yourself, get to work. Don’t worry about the outcomes and don’t try to control the consequences of it. If it won’t go a 100% the way you want it to go, it will at least give you a good learning experience. Something that you can not only carry, but also talk about in your case study when you’ll be presenting yourself as a senior designer!
Ipso facto: the truth is not
Being a senior doesn’t have a lot to do with the title, or even with the kind of work that you will be doing. But it definitely has everything to do with your personality, how you operate under pressure, and if you can handle autonomy and independence in work.
Any manager, lead or an organisation looking for a senior designer isn’t looking for someone who they can ‘train’. They’re looking at people who have had experiences in their previous jobs, that make them the perfect candidates for that role. Experiences such as getting the job done. Being the go-getters. Finding problems. Hunting for solutions.
Being someone who can take care of their own stuff. Being a responsible and factual designer who doesn’t need hand holding throughout projects. They can be left alone to find water in a desert and they’ll be fine. Make sure you are fine. And not dead!
Senior designers might also have to work all by themselves. Alone in projects. Where they are navigating through the troughs and trenches of the product, where they are juggling with user research and pressure from business, and where they have to advocate for their design decisions. By advocating I mean really standing up for things that you believe in. It may go against those around you, but if you feel it is the right thing to do, speak for it. Take a stand and do the right thing.
Don’t push every feature just because the business feels like it’s a good idea. Do some goddamn research and validate your assumptions.
Being a senior doesn’t just mean to own your stuff, but many times it also means to take a stand for those who work with you. Junior designers, whom you may need to protect. Your team, for whom you may need to take a bullet. Of course you can’t do that at expense of your own career but yeah, by this point you should get what I mean.
Once you’re doing all of this as a mid-level designer, you’re halfway there to be a senior. The remaining authority comes from an actual promotion or a job switch with a senior title, where you will actually be responsible for everything that you signed up for!
A mid-level person may still be expected to work ‘with’ some other designers in the team but a senior ‘maybe’ expected to behave like the alpha wolf. Part of the tribe in many ways, but operating independently.