Do your career a favor: Don’t be a design generalist forever
As we approach the end of the year, thoughts of New Year’s resolutions and annual reviews loom. While many focus on addressing weaknesses as much as praising strengths, if you’re looking to advance your career in 2025 here is what I’d recommend: Stop being a design generalist.
For beginners early in their career (0–2 years) being a generalist is great. I highly recommend this for all newbies out there. This is critical for not only identifying what you’re awesome at (it may be different than you thought!) but will ensure that you don’t have major skill gaps that actually hold you back. It’s ok to have strengths and weaknesses, but a gap in skills is a lot harder to overlook by potential hiring managers.
However for the more mid-level individuals (2–5 years) who want to jump-start their advancement, I encourage a different approach on goals and growth.
Growth ≠ Fixing Weaknesses
Growth areas are not things you’re bad at, and thus want to improve. At least they don’t have to be. Growth areas for those wanting to advance should be things you know you’re already good at, but want to double down on, expand, or go from good to expert. In fact, I’d argue that turning every area you’re not good at into a goal for growth is not only an inefficient use of time and energy, but is a one way ticket to mediocrity.
I was guilty of this for a long time. I looked at ‘areas of growth’ as highlighting the things I wasn’t good at. Personal and professional development centered on identifying and improving areas of weakness. I looked at the definition of ‘growth’ as “areas I want to not suck”. I’m not alone in this either; I’ve heard this narrative from tenured designers and managers alike.
This made a hard pivot for me several years back, and its completely changed my thinking on my own career. I had a manager several years ago who told me this exact principal: That “areas of growth are not things you’re bad at”. I think I did a little ‘smile and nod’ number, cause it just did not compute. In my mind, strengths were good-to-go check boxes of success and ‘areas of growth’ were the bad grades I needed to pull up. It wasn’t till several years later that this clicked for me as I was thinking through career goals, and I thought about how I didn’t want to just be good at something, I wanted to be great.
Don’t waist your time
I was recently talking with someone about this, and used how I’m horrible at spelling as an example. Full transparency, I’m not just bad, but truly horrendous. No red squiggly line? Looks right to me! Anyway the point is, this is something I regularly noted as a ‘growth area’ for years. Until eventually I decided that I didn’t think it was a good use of all the time I was investing in it. So much of my brain power was going into checking every single line of copy in Google (this was back before Sketch had spell-check, and yes back when Sketch was a thing) and all that energy could have been better used in growing a skill that could go from good to great. How much time and energy would I have saved if I hadn’t been so stressed-out about if I spelled something incorrectly?
Arguably, as long as it’s not complexly illegible and it’s not going into production, who cares about a few typoes? (see what Idid there?)
Conversely, I’ve always been a decent communicator (if a bit verbose), and this translated into my ability to tell stories and present in front of groups. I didn’t seem to have the same struggle I’d seen in friends who were paralyzed by the idea of public speaking — sure it still made me nervous, but I’ve always been pretty good at talking. I decided a goal of mine would be to not just be good, but be great: To be comfortable speaking to large groups and come across completely at ease with complicated subject matter, avoid filler words (um, uh), and captivate my audience.
Focusing my energy on improving this single skill, that I already considered to be a strength, has led to huge improvements in my ability to articulate my ideas, and communicate to a broad range of people. I’m now able to better convey highly complicated ideas through stories and my work has improved as a result.
Am I ready to give a TED talk? Absolutely not. I’m still what I would consider decent, but not an expert. But this is an example where I took a self-identified strength and decided to invest my ‘growth energy’ on it, rather than focusing on my shortfalls.
This can be a bit of a tightrope. The exception to this, is if a weakness is holding you back from overall success. Using this same example of spelling: if it was bad enough that I wasn’t able to accurately communicate my idea, or it confused people when looking at my work, then thats when I’d need to implement goals or mechanisms for improvement.
Time is a Limited Resource
To clarify, I’m certainly not saying that improving upon deficits isn’t a worth while endeavor. It absolutely is. But it comes down to the value of the investment. What is the pay-off of improving a skill at this moment? Time is a precious and finite resource. When designers spend excessive time trying to improve areas where they’re weak, they miss opportunities to excel in their areas of strength. This can lead to mediocrity across the board instead of excellence in key areas, reduced innovation due to less time spent on creative problem-solving in areas of expertise and lower job satisfaction, as people tend to enjoy tasks they’re good at more than those they struggle with.
This could manifest as designers spending time learning complex coding skills when their strength lies in architectural design, potentially resulting in both subpar code and less insightful UX frameworks.
It’s my belief that a team of designers with deep, complementary expertise can create significantly better products than a team of generalists of the same size. A combination of specialized skills can lead to more innovative, refined, and user-friendly products than a team of generalists all tag-teaming a project together.
The last peace of the puzzle
Probably one of the most important elements to all of this is: Desire. What do you WANT to be good at? It’s entirely possible that one of your weaknesses IS what you want to be great at. What I’m advocating for is not choosing your goals simply because they are a weakness. Find the parts of your work and process you enjoy (which also tend to be what we’re good at), and find ways to build upon your existing talents in order to become a highly desirable expert on a team.
Reframing growth from fixing weaknesses to leveraging strengths can help you separate yourself in this very saturated industry of design. Your goals will have higher impact on your advancement, and you’ll immediately start to see the results in your work.
Don’t fixate on all the areas you feel like you’re missing the bar, but instead identify where you want to set the bar.
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Thanks Kévin Moënne-Loccoz for the Figma assets!
