A huge goal of mine is to identify emergent skills needed in the realm of digital product design and provide methods and articles to help aspiring designers progress in their career far faster than I was able to.
With this goal in mind, I was sourcing some LinkedIn job descriptions to identify job role trends, and on my very first one I ran in to some major concerns. Designers love a good critique. The posting I’ll be referencing here is for a Junior UX Designer at a medium-sized (1,000-5,000 employees) biomedical company.
I am open to hearing that there may be some rationale for this criteria that I am overlooking, and I hope someone would point that out. Barring that, I hope hiring managers will take note. Here are the five primary requirements for the role:
“Lead and influence business-wide discussions relative to current user experience projects and the future direction of design and user experience.”
Is this meant to hire a junior or scare them away? Most juniors are fresh out of school, and cannot possibly have the soft skills needed to lead business-wide discussions. This is unrealistic and unfair. These soft skills can take years to develop. You start at the peer level, grow comfortable at the team level, and eventually become proficient articulating things at the organizational level, but this is a long journey.
I won’t even get in to the second line where they expect a junior to be able to cast a future-state vision that is compelling to stakeholders and business leaders. If this is what you expect of a junior, I’d love to see what Leads and Directors are doing at this company. I would rephrase this as “Contributes to…”
“Demonstrate a strong understanding of Agile / Lean UX methodologies.”
This is one of the more fair points, although I might argue that it still feels too constrained. For one, it depends on your organization and how embedded Design is with IT and QA. Often, designers are working multiple sprints ahead of their IT partners, and so you really don’t need to be overly savvy about Agile, Lean, or enterprise processes like SAFe – at least at the Junior level. I will also point out that this is a very ambiguous request. What does it mean to understand it? What’s the real goal here? Are you expecting this designer to lead Agile ceremonies? Are you expecting them to be able to immediately embed on an Agile development team and speak their language? Is the goal here that the designer can demonstrate an ability to adapt quickly to new constraints or changes in the product roadmap?
One thing I despised about college was how quickly material became outpaced by the industry because curriculum taught to specific processes or products, as opposed to equipping you with the range of competencies needed to excel with any product that comes out. Perhaps this could be worded like “Can integrate quickly in to a team that leverages agile methodologies,” but again, I would push back on how much a Junior really needs to be versed in this. They’re not teaching this in (most) schools.
“Quickly and iteratively create user flows, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fidelity mockups with detailed and scalable visual design specifications for web and mobile interfaces throughout the design process.”
These items are all fairly common asks at this level, but since we’re having fun being nit-picky, I’d push back on some of the language. For example, what’s the difference between a user flow and a wireframe or a prototype? Doesn’t this depend on the person’s style and how they were taught? What’s the real expectation here? Would you really expect a junior to be able to knock out a high fidelity mockup for a game-changing app or interface? These often take weeks or months if you’re talking about working with a scalable Design System, building out all the interaction flows, identifying the specs, running critiques among various impacted teams, including OS-specific guidance or specs, and of course testing early and often. There is a lot going on there. Would you actually trust someone who says they can do all of this… quickly… by themself?
“Leads research and evaluation of emerging design, technology, industry, and market trend.”
I feel we’re starting to mix requests here. I would technically consider part of the prior requirement pertaining to the ability to create artifacts. Making and learning go together.
This also only hits on one small facet of Design Research. This seems to be talking about Market or Competitive Research, while there are many other elements of research that are even more beneficial to design, such as Qualitative research methods, Quantitative research methods, and being able to synthesize that data into actionable insights to enable rich ideation sessions. But again, I wouldn’t expect this from a Junior fresh in their career.
“Lead the design planning and strategic phases of a project. Proactively pitch new CX ideas backed by strong, well-articulated rationale.”
This is truly a jack of all trades now. Not only is this person producing highly complex design artifacts, but they also have to find time to create project strategy for new and future work. Where are they going to find time for all this? As an applicant, I’d be getting real worried about how many hours I might be putting in here.
Perhaps this is just poorly phrased, and they intended to say something like “Adequately scope complex work into manageable deliverables on your Agile team’s roadmap?”
“Independently deliver design solutions for problems of large scope and complexity. Work through ambiguity, and adapt your approach to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders.”
Ok, so they are expecting one person to do all of this alone. What worries me beyond just the tasks being described here is the culture that is being subtly revealed. What does it say about a company that advocates for this kind of solo work? I didn’t see the word “team” mentioned once. Neither did I see anything about company values, mission, or culture. Where is the support for this role? No mention of how they’ll integrate with other designers or design systems in place.
And there we go, we made it to the end of the requirements! How’s your stress level? Am I over analyzing here? Not being hard enough? Am I the only one who cares to scrutinize over these descriptions? What are your thoughts?
