Careers aren't linear.

The (non)sense of jobtitles and levels.

Hi! I’m Maureen and UX.Reflection is a place where I share my thoughts on product design and careergrowth. New here? Subscribe to my newsletter to receive a new post every once in a while.

---

Here are two lessons I’ve learned in the past years:

1. Careers are not linear and that’s okay.

2. Jobtitles are kinda random and that’s very confusing.

I used to think of careers as linear progression. You start as a junior or intern somewhere and end up at a C-level position after years of grinding.

That’s not the reality. Careers change, you change and most of all - job titles seem to change every year. In the past 5 years of working as a designer, I’ve been called a UX designer, a Service Designer and a Product Designer. My tasks and responsibilities have stayed largely the same, with some differences that were more related to the company or project I was working on rather than the role expectations.

My expectations

When starting out in my first job as a UX designer, I assumed the only career option I had was to climb the ladder from junior designer to manager at some point. I wasn’t so excited about the idea of becoming a manager at the time, but I didn’t know about the role of IC (individual contributor) yet.

After a year or so, I got a promotion and that dreading '“Junior” in front of my job title was gone. In my -naive- mind, I figured it would be best to get that “Senior” title as soon a possible. That would mean I was a real designer and other people would see me as such. And what I think was that fast way to become a senior?

Changing jobs.

Yes - another naive thought I had was that every job change would automatically mean a promotion into a higher level.

I had a lot of assumptions about careergrowth and they turned out to all be wrong.

My reality

The reality looks different.

Looking at my own career and that of my friends and design peers, I realise that only very few people have a career that developed very linear. A lot of people around me made a careerswitch, took a pay cut to join a company that matched their values better or accepted a different jobtitle.

My initial career progression was pretty linear: I moved from a junior to a midlevel to a senior role pretty quickly. Until I made the switch from mid-sized agencies to an in-house role at a big German corporate. That move meant taking a step back in terms of job title and moving from a senior Service Designer role to a midlevel Product Designer role.

However, it did not felt like a step back as my salary increased with nearly 50%. It took me another year to move up to a Senior title again. In this in-house role I learned about the Individual Contributor (IC) path instead of the manager path I always envisioned (and slightly dreaded). As an individual contributor, you stay very close to the craft and have the opportunity to specialise rather than hold direct responsibilities for people and processes like managers have.

The in-house role gave me a different perspective on how to shape my career. It made me realise that I could pursue different paths than growing into a managerial role. It also showed me that there are multiple ways to progress and a job title isn’t that important to me. Team culture, work-life balance and salary had more impact in my life than a title.

With my move to Amsterdam and landing a job at Miro, I once again moved back to a midlevel role. Again, this did not feel like a step back because I first of all had the opportunity to work on a product that I’ve been a fan of for years and secondly, my salary increased considerably again.

As you can already guess by now- again I found out my career isn’t as linear and I’m actually warming up to the idea of pursuing a managerial role (to be continued…)

Take aways

If there’s anything to learn from my career progression so far, it’s these three things:

1. Don’t get lost focusing on “seniority levels” alone. They aren’t that leading for career progression. What is leading are things that have actual impact on your (mental) wellbeing: learning opportunities, work-life balance, team culture and monetary compensation.

2. There are many different career paths, including Individual Contributor paths that focus more on specializing your skills.

3. Don’t rush your careergrowth. There’s plenty of time to grow into a senior role and there a benefits to junior/midlevel roles too! The workpressure is less high, you can.

---

A note on growth and mentorship

There are two things that really helped me grow my career.

The first one is constantly seeking out new knowledge and enrolling in online courses and workshops.

The second one is seeking out mentorship in the broadest sense. Oftentimes people understand “mentorship” as 1:1 sessions with a very clear agenda, although I’ve noticed that mentorship for me takes many forms. I follow industry leaders on LinkedIn, subscribe to newsletters, build loose relationships with experienced designers to listen to their stories and derive important lessons from all of these sources.

One of those people that have taught me a lot simply through reading his newsletter is Anton Sten. It’s actually one of the first design-focused newsletters I subscribed to five years ago and it’s the one that inspired me to start my own newsletter. I can fully recommend you subscribe to his newsletter.

---

Thanks for reading!

Did you like this post?

• 💬 Share your thoughts in the comments.

• 💌 Subscribe to this newsletter if you liked this post and you want to read more about product design and careergrowth.

• ⭐️ Refer this newsletter to your friends and get exclusive access to freebies like my Workshop Facilitation guide or Careergrowth Notion.

Hi, I’m Maureen and I work as a product designer at Miro. In my free time, I help designers level up their career by sharing my wins and mistakes.

You can also find me on

• LinkedIn

• Instagram