Know your worth; find your path
This week we explore today's compensation benchmarks and career tracks
Know your worth; find your path
Interviewing for your first or second design job will result in some familiar struggles along the way. You need to show that you’re flexible and talented enough to take on anything, but focused and determined enough to have a view on how you want your career to grow.
As a result, you pursue the balancing act presenting yourself to employers as:
eager, sincere, and willing go the extra mile day in and day out…
…while still deserving paid commensurate to the value you expect to deliver
an adaptable UX or Product generalist, willing to go outside your comfort zone and job description to ship quality features quickly…
…while signaling that you set ambitious targets for your career in a way that convinces them you’re not just “along for the ride”
Know your worth
How much should you be making tho? Age-old question for anyone trying to get a jump on their career. There are a myriad rules and tricks and tactics that you could look up or we could rehash here, but that may not be so useful. Instead, let’s state a few assumptions and establish them as ground rules for negotiation:
Never give ’em your numbers first
Whoever you interview with should give you at least the base salary range they expect to pay for this role before you tell them what you expect or target.
Always be willing to negotiate
Be grateful for any offer for an interview process you’ve seen through; just know that gratitude doesn’t have to translate to “yes” unless your needs ($$$) and their needs are met.
Do your damned research
There’s no excuse for not having at least a sense of what you’re worth and why. If you’re going to state your case, you need receipts.
2021 Compensation Baselines
Fortunately you can outsource, crowdsource, and do snap polls to get a strong sense of comparable salary data. This doesn’t have to be super scientific — what you want is a temperature check on where the market is for your expected title, skillset, years of experience, and regional market.
But if you want more confidence in the numbers, check out what Peter Javorkai, Product Designer at Adidas, recently put together a UX salary overview for the US in 2021. You’ll find the fruits of his arduous data collection and assembly efforts in Airtable embeds throughout his article. Dive in for salary ranges by metro area across the most common job title groupings:
UX Designer (also includes ranges for Sr. UX Designer, Lead UX designer)
UI Designer (+ range for Sr. UX Designer)
Product Designer (+ range for Sr. Product Designer)
UX Writer
UX Researcher
Know the market, gauge your competition, and, equip yourself in those negotiations with the data to back up your requests.
Envisioning your Career Path
Even a highly sought-after skillset like UX Design has a wealth of specializations within the discipline. And if you’re early in your career, chances are you’re not gung-ho about sticking to one specific niche for the rest of your life.
It’s still crucial to familiarize yourself with the options and career paths that are available to you — well before you run straight into the forks that force you make that choice.
Career Ladders
Zendesk’s Design org publicly shares their Product Design Career Paths for ICs as well as for Management — get acquainted with them. Do any of these options look like your story for the next several years?
Earnestly investigate what different journeys can look like, what excites you, and what skills gaps you have to round out to get where you want to go. Moreover, consider the challenges you’re eager to take on as you build your credentials and assume more responsibilities over time.
Sure, Zendesk is a large company — these specific titles and levels don’t apply everywhere. Larger companies tend to have more rigid, but solidly well-defined criteria to help guide you towards consistent progress within the department.
But understanding the distinctions in an environment that tends to require more specialized needs can help you craft a far more specific vision for your future.
Specialists vs. Generalists
In Figure out what to do; Specialist vs. Managerial track, Waris Hussain walks you through the pros and cons of going down each track. What’s particularly useful in Waris’s post is the list of potential strengths and preferences that you’d consider in choosing one lane over another.
Deciding on which track you want to pursue frees up the energy and the thinking capacity and allows you to really focus on the skills you need to develop for the respective track.
So, how do you make the call that will ultimately define the rest of your career? By reflecting, getting really clear about your own career goals, your personality, and personal preferences, and really figuring out what YOU want.
To be fair, this exercise can open up a whole other can of worms. For example: just because your strengths may align with one path over another doesn’t mean you shut yourself off from opportunities outside of your comfort zone.
What if you find yourself in the “specialist” category but want to work on the skills that would make you a good manager? What if you change your values, goals, or ambitions over time? Does picking a lane early mean committing to it forever?
Of course not. But it helps you advocate for yourself, both during the interview process and on the job. Picking a lane means making a solid enough commitment to maintain focus on a narrow enough band of skills to improve on over many months and years.
As you learn more about what you’re good at, what you want, and (arguably more importantly) what you don’t — you can confidently pivot.
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