The Jobs Market – Superavi

Escape routes from dead end Design careers

Posted on July 17, 2018July 17, 2018

Entering the design profession is sometimes like love at first sight, but it can also be something you simply want to do and learn to respect. Design is one of the most popular fields for people to move into from other professions.

Design has been called many things in the past, but even as a definition it’s referring to a multitude of activities across times. Within the design profession there are people who are more creative and some that are more scientific in their approach. Some people can draw, other can write, and some can think, but designers have to study all of these and continually try to be better at them all. At this given point of time the most popular design roles are UX, UI, and Graphic Designer and I’m focused on these when I refer to ‘design’.

In this article I will explore the reasons for transitioning in and out of design, the have baked approaches that companies have developed towards sustaining designers on a career path, and the developing skill set of the designer who aspires to be an executive.

Transitioning

In my article Are you boxed in? Getting to beyond professional roles and job titles

I talked about the main drivers behind people who want to go through the process of changing career.

Within a person’s work life the two main key problems are interest and progression. Interest is hard to maintain now that we work for 55 years on average. It’s impossible to be interested in the same field for that long. Progression is another stumbling block because within those 55 years the thing that keeps the best people alive is constant change and challenge.

You would think that the design profession supports multi-disciplinary people, but it doesn’t.

Transition from another discipline to Design

Many software developers, economists, and lawyers have transitioned into the design profession. Changing career usually leads to a temporary step down in salary and status. I’m not sure about the statistics but I’ve personally met more people who have downgraded their salary to ‘design level’ than people who’ve upgraded. The main reasons I’ve heard are all linked to the fact that design is essentially social. People transition into design because they want to do something they love (and it can be cool at times).

I have found it quite hard for a developer to excite a CEO, or even friends at dinner, with the things they do. A developer expects to get a project done fast, but built properly and, of course, to come up with meaningful ideas to solve problems. The difference between the designer and the developer is that the developer is usually solving problems that are quite complex, have a lot of interdependent issues to deal with and must understand a lot of abstract, technical stuff. Whereas the designer is usually solving problems that people can see, and they solve them by talking to people and testing it with people. This is something that people find easier to talk about over dinner, something that everyone can have an opinion on. That’s why design problem solving can be more exciting for the CEO, a marketing executive, and people in general.

For many people being a designer is a dream: very few try to learn more about how to live that dream and even fewer succeed at living it. I have learnt that when something looks easy, it probably means I know nothing about it. The design profession suffers from appearing easier than it is, but once people dive into design, its complexity unfolds. Design is a social role. Designers talk to people, do ethnographic research, user testing, build stuff fast, launch, fail and learn. It’s a diverse field and that means it should be open to people from diverse backgrounds.

Transitioning from Design to another discipline

People in design usually love it, so if they are ‘leaving’ the field it happens because of three reasons:

They don’t like the fluff, and they prefer to answer to a clearer set of instructions. I call it the “either it works or it doesn’t” attitude.

2. Designers sometimes discover that they are really good at their craft, or art, and want to be their own masters.

3. They have power and economic aspirations, but in their organisation being a designer means they continually need to fight their corner and educate others about the value of design.

* By mentioning changing career away from design I’m only referring to designers who were professionally doing design. Looking back at my BA, and even my MA, the average percentage of people who learnt design alongside me and actually are working as designers is 50%

Let’s look at the design profession roles over the past few years…

The ever-changing professional design environment is where the problem for the cross-disciplinary person starts.

Here are some of the jobs that come within the design category:

Graphic designer, Human-computer interaction, Interaction designer, Designer researcher, Motion designer, UI designer, UX designer, Product designer, Design manager, Principal designer, Design Ops, Head of design, Creative Director, Director of Design — and that’s without adding Intern, Junior, Mid-weight, Senior, Executive and Global to each level. Two-thirds of this list are roles that were invented in the past 10 years. As you know, ‘Design’ is quite a new discipline, and as I grow older, I see more and more job titles that were created to sustain the 45-year-old designer, most of which never existed before.

I was recently exposed to this Progression.fyi by Jonny Burch which aggregates career ladders and measurements for designers inside enterprise companies. Looking at many of these companies’ ‘ladders’ it is obvious that this is still a work in progress and that a lot of that progress is being made by designers who need to invent their own career path while at the same time trying to get more leadership roles.

You can argue that design is not that new. It exists in commercial art, architecture and interior decoration, and the marketing and branding agencies established it as a profession many years ago. As the years pass many big tech firms started forming their own internal design agencies, as design departments which therefore adopted the hierarchy. But, I would argue that working for an agency with a fast-paced project versus working on a setting within the security settings submenu for a whole year are two extremely different experiences.

The leading Silicon Valley companies have a different take on this phenomenon. Companies like Google et al solve the issue of a traditional hierarchy within a sector by stripping away fancy titles and just call employees, “Designer’. ‘Manager’ or ‘VP of something’. You can see examples of this in many people’s LinkedIn profiles where they have gone from Senior Creative Global Director to UX designer.

The differences in ‘roles’ are often dependent on who the designer defines as their client. Is the client a Head of Design who has the mandate to enforce good design work, or a person from the marketing department looking for an inspirational piece of design? The brief, the client, the environment, the time frame and focus are the things that completely change the depth to which a designer can dive.

But design is everything: it is vision, research and ways of shifting the organisation — right?

Even though the designers are doing a great job of selling themselves within organisations today, their future is still moot. The plethora of jobs that were created in the past 10 years shackles designers to a slow career progression. Companies don’t have any new roles to give to these people: they can’t promote them to management, but they want to retain them, so they invent a new role. Yet the role of the adult designer might result in bathos. Maybe in 20 years, there will be a CDO (Chief Design Officer) role in big companies, but as long as there is no such role I foresee designers struggling and feeling unchallenged, especially when they are aware of their real potential.

How many are there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_design_officer

What prevents designers from taking leadership roles?

There are areas and roles outside of design that unfortunately only great designers consider. For example, many designers see ‘Business’ as a Pandora’s Box that they are afraid to open. Development (coding) is another area that many designers ignore. Personally I’m extremely interested in how things are being built because it affects what I can and cannot do as a designer at a later stage, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many designers choose to focus on the vision and design things without any constraints, such as use case or budget. In leadership it can never be just about the ‘vision’; it’s about the business and measuring your results. It’s about setting up goals and achieving them while taking responsibility for specific outcomes. Especially in leadership the role of the design educator never ends. Very much like a CMO it needs to be reinforced with proofs, that’s a different story.

To be an executive you need to be a leader and a part of that role requires widening your knowledge about all areas of the business. Ideally at any point of a designer’s growth path they need to interlink with other departments but it amplifies the further up you climb up the ladder. At that point the discussion should include passion and sense, deep understanding of the user, but also of the the technological stack, the organization’s DNA and the business goals. The best people to do that kind of job are people who have a richly varied experience: multidisciplinary people who sometimes have a background scattered around different professions, but can weave a sense and a story into their decisions and career progression.

Design doesn’t have an expiration date and I truly believe in design leadership. I think that every company should have an equivalent to Chief Design Officer in management. However I think that in many companies talented designers will have to go through product or marketing roles in order to uplift design and change the management’s perspective on what design is and how closely it should be aligned with business, product and development.

To the future CDOs 🥂

Are you boxed in? Getting to beyond professional roles and job titles

Posted on July 4, 2018

Every time I have had to look for a job, I have found myself having to box myself into an application template or a job spec. To cover every possible instance, I used to make a couple of CVs, tweak my LinkedIn, produce multiple portfolios and a few different cover letters as standard procedure. I’m not the only one.

I have never walked the acceptable route. At university, I studied two specialties, rather than one, which was the default school scheme. I was into coding, which almost no one else was, which meant I had the wonderful chance to work for my teachers and learn their design practices while I applied the code to make them a reality. It was very clear to me then that design is not enough to make things real, and it was only later I learnt that development and design are also not enough: I had to learn more about business.

I don’t believe in linear growth; I believe in exponential growth (like a startup). I believe cross-disciplinary teams are strong, and the same is true for cross-disciplinary people. However, it’s not easy to convince people of that. I live in hope that the new world will see these kinds of people as Da Vincis, rather than as “unfocused”, which seems to be the typical response.

Titles are misleading

When filling in an application template, or writing your CV, we’ve been taught that titles are important. I believe titles are worthless, because they don’t trust indicators of what people do. It’s better to rely on descriptions of work, and even better to have references. What’s good about titles is that the discipline is encapsulated in the title. It’s easy to tell the orientation or that person, or which profession they belong to. Still at the end, what counts and what’s trusted is only real feedback from trusted contacts.

Changing jobs

Sixty percent of people claim they would change a career if they could start over. and 51% of twenty-somethings already regret their career choice (Source: School of Life, 2008).

Career Route

People might think that a change in someone’s career perhaps suggest that they weren’t good at the previous role, or that they are unfocused, but I strongly disagree. There are many people who transition from another discipline to design and vice versa.

According to the Bureau of Labor (2017) people change jobs an average of 12 times throughout their working life, which means they usually stay in each job an average of 4.2 years. In addition, in the early years 25-35 of the career trajectory, each role lasts around 2.5 years and when they reach higher roles it’s around six years.

Changing a job is not the same as changing a career

One in every 10 people in the UK considers changing their career (Guidance Council, 2010). According to the 2015 and 2016 data from the Current Population Survey, about 6.2 million workers (4 percent of the total workforce) transferred from one occupational group to another. Are we making it easy for them to do that? And why do they want to do it? And another question is; why do so many people think that changing career is ‘madness’, whereas changing your job is quite ordinary?

change career

Why not stay in a ‘career’ and be an ‘expert’?

I am a musician, but like many others, most of us are not on stage alongside Beyonce. Most of us don’t even make money out of music. We’re hobby-professional musicians who do other things for a living, but we still maintain our love and understanding of music. Some might argue it’s a purer way, one that reflects our truth, freed from ‘the industry’ so our music can be loved by people who really value it. Am I better than Jay-Z? Probably not. Would I be if I would have done it 100% of my time? Maybe. Would I be as successful as he is? Who knows.

Granted, making money out of music is harder than most of every other profession, but is making money out of your skills enough? Or is music more about making your own ‘art’, and surely the amount of people who get paid for that is tiny! Even if you can make money out of something you love, surely you’ll have aspirations, to grow bigger, to learn new things and not to do the same stagnant thing over and over again.

Most people can’t be experts

My point is, to be an expert is hard and only 2% of people in each field can achieve that level of mastery while others suffer from boredom (after 2 years doing the same job), lack of challenge and lack of progression. This leads to mediocrity, and eventually redundancy at the age of 55 when that person can’t find a job anymore, because they don’t have other skills and they are so worn out that they haven’t learned anything new professionally in the past 10 years.

And this leads me to say – once an expert, not always an expert. People move on, time doesn’t freeze and people who once were the tip of the spear could just as well now be stuck in the ground somewhere. The only thing that lives is organic growth. How many people made a one hit wonder, had a short career as a model, launched a successful startup and then had many other failures after? Most! I applaud the lessons of history and learning from biographies and stories, but it’s an over-simplified admiration for a set of events that can never happen again.

The only things that people like to do again and again are things that were designed to make us addicts or ones that are instrumental to our survival.

So, when you’re searching for a new role and you feel like going cross-disciplinary, but are worried about how an employer is going to view your career so far, and how you’re going to deal with the questions about why you haven’t stuck in one role for a decade or more, take a look at these questions and think about how you might answer them.

Here are some questions worth asking yourself

How long do you think it takes to master something?
What happens to mastery if you neglect it and go and do something else for a while?
What is the difference between being 80% good at many things, rather than being 100% good at just one thing?
How does it feel to do many things (same things) for a long time?
How does my 100% compare with some other person’s 100%?

Within a person’s work life the two main key problems are interest and progression. Interest is hard to maintain now that we work for 55 years on average. It’s impossible to be interested in the same field for that long. Progression is another stumbling block, because within those 55 years the thing that keeps the best people alive is constant change and challenge. And, since challenges grow as you rise up the ladder, the compensation should align with it. Not only because the cost of living is rising, but mainly because it’s the main way to drive human beings in a positive way.

Not everyone is ambitious. Some people stay unhappy and won’t do anything about it. Some will always be unhappy no matter what happens or what they do. But in a workplace, when you see these amazing people that drive your business forward, the entrepreneur or super dedicated employee, you should help them. Help them to learn more, help them change career. Be open to someone with a CV that shows a career change. You might think it’s better for your business to have someone who did something all of their life, but the time span of doing a particular job has nothing to do with the quality of the output. It’s better having diversity in a business, with people from all kinds of backgrounds, rather than disqualifying them. Humans have a desire to evolve, and that’s the benefits of that are what you’ll get if you hire a person who doesn’t neatly fit into a box.

Recruiters don’t work for startups — Why I’m cutting the middleman

Posted on August 27, 2017May 21, 2018

We’ve all seen Google’s search results when you type recruiter. I’ve read multiple “open letters”, hate posts, attempts to explain how “companies” and “candidates” should be treated. I have recently experienced it from the “company” side, which surprisingly is even more annoying than the “candidate” side. But that’s not the purpose of this post. The purpose is to focus on recruiting for startups, how it is now and how it can possibly become better. Obviously I’ll start with a short rant, but after I’ll try to gracefully outline some new thoughts and ideas for making this work.

Once upon a time…

Well actually it was a couple of months ago, I started scouting for developers for my platform and posted a naive message on LinkedIn. I was hoping to get some replies from interesting developers. Within one minute of posting, I received a phone call. It was a recruiter. I’ve written before about the pyramid of communication. Obviously, it threw me off when a salesperson called me without my permission. As far as I’m concerned, people should call if they (1) Want intimacy (2) Have something urgent to say (3) Are close to me and want to tell me a long story that it’ll take too long to write. But because it caught me off guard I agreed to talk to the recruiter.

A few days had passed and as a result of that post I got loads of messages, all from recruiters. Actually, I also posted the request on Facebook. The overall result of my 3300 connections in LinkedIn and 1700 friends in Facebook amounted to 20 messages from recruiters and one friend that recommended a person. That’s a pretty crappy return on what’s supposed to be the core value of the platform — namely finding employees.

The following week was full of unexpected calls from recruiters, contacting me left, right and centre whenever they felt like it. Some calls were even at weird times. And of course everyone leaves voice messages instead of sending an email.

We had a couple of interviews and after the first batch, we realized that the definition of what we were looking for was wrong. The recruiters didn’t get it, it was the developers themselves who explained it to us. So much for expert recruiters who can translate your need into reality.

I must admit I’ve experienced two approaches from recruiting agencies. The first is ”I’m not working till I’m promised money because I don’t want to waste my time”, the other is “we give you value then up-sell”.

Working in a startup has many unknowns to tackle, therefore, I prefer to minimize unknowns especially when it comes to burning rate. So even with agencies that didn’t mention their terms, I defined in advance a day rate including the agency fee. The problem was that, even after taking that step, once the agency saw I was interested in a candidate they started renegotiating the rate. Time is the most valuable asset a startup has and since a big part of my time is prioritizing and planning I have zero tolerance for things that waste my time.

Let’s talk about money

The recruiting agency model is most definitely not matched for startups. Let’s assume a person is 100 per day, a recruiter will take between 15–25 percent on top of that. For every day a person works for me, I will pay 100 to them and 25 to the recruiter, and the best part is that’s how it works forever.

If you want to hire a person permanently it’ll be a bit different. You will have to pay 20–30% in one go. So if someone earns 100k you will have to pay 30k immediately, after their probation is over.

Big companies save so much money by having their own HR and processes but also reluctantly sometimes use recruiters if they need to grow fast. But for a startup who raised seed or A round money, the prospect of subscribing to recruiters forever, or giving an immediate payout for a perm role is foolish.

Professional startup consultants

Solicitors, closers, and advisors learned and developed ways to work with startups, by agreeing to risks, getting paid a bit now and then more later. Startup employees who also believe in the company do the same. To me it makes perfect sense, and recruiters should see an amazing prospect here too. The startup can continue hiring through them for a very long time, and maybe at some point even buy them as their HR department. You’d think that would work for everyone involved.

But throughout my experience, I haven’t seen any flexibility, no models that work well for startups. The business world has evolved, but it feels like the recruiting world has stood still. After all, what does a startup need when it comes to recruitment:

The ability to understand they made a mistake and terminate a contract quickly if the person doesn’t fit.
The support and connection of people who believe in it.

What does a startup have to give:

The promise it’ll be new, agile, interesting and revolutionary.
A return on investment of either time or money.

I think more recruiting agencies should start developing a model for this. The corporate world is brilliant but the startup world has much to offer too. Invest in startups and we will be grateful. I promise you it will translate into long-term working relationships.

The whole reason to choose a recruitment agency is to save you time, but I guess I’ve learned there are no shortcuts here. My advice to myself is to use personal recommendations (like we did so far) and go to meetups and find people myself. Maybe one day when there are good models I’ll test the recruiting world again, but at the moment it feels dated and rigid.

How to make recruitment work for startups

Flexibility

In a startup things are unexpected mainly due to inexperience. Lack of experience could be reflected in: legal, recruiting, management etc. In addition, the startup might pivot or get hit with a lawsuit or a partner crisis. The startup world is hard and unstable, so warmth and flexibility help oil the joints.

Flexibility can also be reflected in the lack of pressure recruiters put on businesses. Work with the startup on their terms. Have a weekly meeting with the CEO about new candidates. Be a part of the mission, anticipate the needs of the company and suggest what roles could help it develop. Instead of bombarding us with emails and phone calls that just distract and create antagonism, let the startup cope. The CEO will talk to you when they have time and if they don’t it’s not your place to push. It probably just means that priorities have changed.

Money

Fire quickly — In reality this flexibility could be in the financial model a recruiter offers a startup. The ability to fire fast is key, especially during the probation period. Big companies can afford to keep the contractor for another two weeks, but in startup life two weeks are like two months.

Vesting — Percentages and big chunks of money don’t work for startups. It’s just not sustainable. Top candidates come and work for a pay cut and blue sky options. They come because they believe in a mission and are willing to work together to make it happen. A recruiter should also believe and invest in the same way. If you are vested the startup will continue working with you. With startups it’s not all about now, it’s about the future. There’s a chance it’ll turn into a Unicorn company and that you’ll have 50% of their recruiting cycle. That’s a lot of business that is good for everyone.

Permanent roles — Let’s face it, in a startup having a perm position doesn’t promise the stability it does in a corporate. The wheels are moving fast, the pressure is high and statistically employees stay less time…mainly because most startups fail. So instead of taking a huge chunk at the beginning, stretch it over a couple of years to make sure it’s the same amount of value a corporate client gets. Yes, there’s a risk involved, but that’s unavoidable when it comes to dealing with startups.

Long-term value

Find a way to give value that stays with the company. Recruiters search for and know many candidates and they can use this to the startup’s advantage. Having a database of options that are a match to the startup could be great for the future. It might not work out today, but it’s definitely valuable for tomorrow. To facilitate that a new account management system should be in place. Imagine an SaaS model for a startup or a yearly subscription that helps the startup keep track of potential employees, ready for the day when they can hire them.

Invest

Startup recruiters should be like VCs and investors. The market is big and many people are looking for jobs or employees. Allow yourself to be selective about the people you work with. Make sure the company you are recruiting for will survive the next six months and if you believe them then invest and create a long-term relationship. Build a pricing range that says, for example, in seed money I will get x% per employee I put to work there, in series A the percentage will grow and in series B as well. Start thinking outside the box when it comes to charging, rather than relying on the current structures that are so ill-suited to startup businesses.

Linked interests

Help the company and advise them as an HR expert. Help them to retain candidates as then your percentage will grow the longer they stay. Link the success of the employee to your success. If they get promoted or stay longer it might help you as well.

Summary

As a recruiter you don’t need to prove that you can find one person who can survive 90 days in the company. You need to be able to continuously bring value when needed and grow the current value based on experience and your success. Recruiting should be less like pimps and more like a long-term relationship. It requires trust, understanding and hard work, as well as support in the bad times as well as the good.

In today’s fast-paced world people move more. I don’t know if it’s because of interest, ambition, boredom, recruiters or bad management. But what I do know is that if someone did a good job for me I’d want to see them again and offer them another job. We’ve all got people that we like working with and that we love to hire, I’d like to see recruiters join that group as well.