A letter to all design students out there

It's been almost two years since I graduated from my Product Design degree at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Earlier this month, I was honored to be invited back to speak on a panel with other experienced graduates about what it takes to be successful in the industry. This turned out to be an engaging discussion with students, and as I transition into a new role, I felt that now would be a good time to pause and reflect. Graduating during the peak of the pandemic and embarking on the change-oriented world of service design, agile product delivery, and digital transformation has been quite the experience. I’ve learned a lot by studying others, asking heaps of questions, and feel eternally grateful to everyone who has been kind enough to share their wisdom with me. I hope that these tips might help inspire others too.

Get curious outside of your discipline

As today’s problems become ever more complex and multifaceted, design has become increasingly connected with technology, strategy, marketing, operations, and the like. In our rapid age of transformation, the role of design today could be to deliver a customer data platform that helps banks get to know their customers better or to transform a retailer’s inefficient supply chain processes using the Cloud. Naturally, the more tools and technologies that you have at your disposal, the more diverse problems you will be able to solve, and thus the more employable you will be.

So, my advice would be to get curious across the board. Listen to podcasts about NFTs. Read books on strategy and marketing. Join AI webinars. Ask questions at the end. Subscribe to design newsletters. Do free online courses. Read plenty of Medium - it’s a great way to let new ideas find you. Listen to TED talks. Wander around art exhibits. Go to Fintech conferences… and most importantly speak to people. It can be daunting at first, but the totality of our lived human experiences is the richest source of knowledge there is. Remember, you can only work with the tools that you have got. So to be in high demand, be curious, go outside, and get more tools.

Get comfortable with change

Design is changing. In the last decade alone, design as a discipline has moved beyond aesthetic, form, and function to play a strategic business role at many organizations. Most, if not all, physical product design now requires the consideration of a far more complex, multifaceted customer journey. We are, in fact, building entire ecosystems, shaping the kind of organizations that we want to see and the societies we wish to live in. As designers, we should be ready to accept that what we build constantly changes in line with what people are consuming. This can be seen in the differing definitions of the word ‘product’ today, as we see human-centered design being driven through new services, systems, organizational processes, and even business models.

Embrace agility. Be ready to shapeshift to meet changing consumer needs and behaviors. Once upon a time, designers were purely asked to give form to physical objects. Then came the digital rise of demand for designing experiences across apps and websites. Now, we’re asked to understand customers better and to help think about business differently. Not before long, something else will take its place. Change is the only constant. Become the change, and you’ll notice that it has nothing on you.

Explore, take different jobs, Don’t worry about titles.

I used to think of a career path as being like a ladder that took you from one rung to the next in an orderly, pre-destined fashion. Junior. Midweight. Senior. Director. Retirement? The trouble with ladders is they give you no room to move around. Just room to fall. On the Frog Design podcast, Salesforce CDO, Justin Maguire explains that careers are actually more like pyramids, where ‘the height you go is predicated — just like a pyramid — on the breadth of your base’. So, for the first few years, focus on broadening your base through all the different roles that you can bring value to as a designer.

In the past year alone, I have worn many weird and wonderful hats ranging from Customer Experience Consultant to Salesforce Business Analyst and even Agile Project Manager. While these may not sound like your typical ‘junior designer’ roles, it‘s been brilliant to understand how different parts of the business work and challenging myself to find better ways to do things for both customers and the organization at large. Moreover, it has taught me that the designer’s toolkit is universal. Design put simply is a consequence of striving to serve people well, and there are so many diverse positions that you can drive positive human-centered change and innovation from within. Don’t worry too much about titles. Build the base of your pyramid first.

Believe in your ability to improve

During the summer of 2020, I baked 3 banana bread loaves, submitted over 500 job applications, and learned two very important things. Firstly, it’s best to treat your portfolio as a constant work in progress rather than rushing to reach a false sense of completion. Once you discard the idea of your portfolio ever really being ‘done’, it becomes a lot easier to work with the one you have in front of you. Having a growth mindset means believing that there is always more that can be done to improve and embracing this state of continuous learning. Secondly, interviewing is a skill. The more applications you send, the more interviews you do, the more frustrating it may feel but also the stronger candidate you will be. Over time, the more experienced you become in explaining your work, the more confident you are in defending your design decisions, and most importantly the more you start to believe in yourabilities.

So rather than beating yourself up in light of a rejection, instead celebrate the fact that you got this far in the process. We learn so much just by trying, failing, and then trying again. It‘s perfectly okay to fall short of perfect. The good news is that most of us already know how to be compassionate, it’s just a case of remembering to apply it to yourself. Even if that job interview doesn't go the way you had hoped, don’t be afraid to follow up and ask how you can improve for next time. The beauty of this iterative discipline that we call Design is that feedback is naturally embedded into the process.

Enjoy the process

I remember being a student just like it was yesterday. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably make a heap of lopsided models and find a lot of ambiguous error messages in your CAD files. There'll be a lot of masking tape and a lot of tears. Hot glue and long hours. But like all challenging experiences, pressure makes diamonds and after four years, you’ll definitely come out of it a lot stronger. Growing pains are normal but try as much as possible to enjoy the process. Remember, there is no poetry where there are no mistakes. For every thing that you break, you learn something. Again, if you are anything like me you will break a lot of stuff. But go easy on yourself. Allow yourself the room to fail wildly, experimentally. Value the fact that you are here in the moment. The journey is the most enjoyable part. That's where you are now.

Simbi x