Start small. Start anywhere.

No design project is too small for beginners. It is the start to understand our value to any team.

Years ago, my first-ever design portfolio had a headline, “I want to use my research and design skills to make the world a better place 🙌”

Such a broad statement feels corny now, even though I know that was a truthful thought. Sadly, I simply had too little work experience to know who I am as a designer. My generic statement didn’t help potential employers see the unique expertises and cultural value I can bring to the team.

Knowing who we are as designers and what kind of value we can contribute takes years of professional work to reveal. It is always evolving, too. To gain such insights, we need to bring ourselves to have honest and consistent reflections about our journeys.

For anyone who is looking for their first design role, this is a big ask. When we lack work experience, we know little about what teams are struggling with, how a valuable designer can help ease the pain, and most importantly, we don’t have proof to demonstrate the impact we could create for the team. That’s why it’s hard to articulate why we should be hired in a way that feels like it is grounded in truth.

However, consistently extracting self-knowledge from our work experience is an important practice throughout our career. It enables us to select work and teams that make us happy, and empowers us to break free from miserable situations.

This is the first post in a series that discusses how we can answer the question, “What kind of designers are you?”. If this topic is on your mind, please message me. I’d like to meet with you to learn about your difficulty, and brainstorm how to get through it.

What is the self-knowledge I’m referring to? Why do we need it?

People and events challenge and shape our views. If we could keep track of our emotions and goals as we move through our career, we would learn the patterns of how we react to circumstances, why we do well, and why we suffer.

Besides sending clear signals to employers about what we are capable of doing, this self-knowledge gives us the superpower to quickly recognize the types of work that makes us happy versus drained, and the behaviors that we admire versus have no tolerance to.

As a result, it saves us time from staying in unhappy situations for too long. It enables us to re-calibrate our career journeys with more small-risk tests. For example, you think your dream job is to work for an AI startup, but you have little experience with AI products. Instead of fully committing to such roles, you could make it a challenge by using 3 highly rated AI products every week, and write down what you learned. Then, help build small AI projects in hackathons. If your projects didn’t go anywhere, the biggest loss is likely your time. However, the return of that lost time is gaining knowledge, skills and the valuable insights whether you actually enjoy collaborating in a fast-paced environment full of ambiguities.

To help you reflect, you could ask yourself:

1. Before the project, why do I want to work at an AI startup?

2. Have I enjoyed working on the project topic, the collaboration process, and the team? Why?

3. What are the skills I have gained? How could they help push my career towards the direction I want it to go?

4. What are the skills I lacked in the project? How could they help push my career towards the direction I want it to go?

5. How confident do I feel about picking up the skills I’m lacking? Why?

6. In order for me to enjoy working on this project more, what do I wish could have been different?

7. How has my initial goal of working at an AI startup changed? 

8. Am I willing to work on another project in order to resolve any hesitations about working at any AI startup? Why?

Questions like these help us sort through our emotions, and capture the changes in our motivations. They support us making more confident decisions about whether we should fully commit to something we think we’d enjoy.

The condition to gain self-knowledge: get work experiences.

When we are just starting our career, no work is too small for us. The primary goals of working on anything we can get our hands on are to include new projects to our portfolios, and to discover our strengths and limitations.

If I’m lucky, I may have a project launched by a real company in my portfolio. However, when I’m providing portfolio feedback to early-career designers on ADPList, I realize this is still rarely the case today.

In fact, my first two projects working with real organizations never saw the light of the day. Both of them are volunteer work. I had one semester left before graduating. Time is ticking for many international students like me. I’ll have to leave the U.S. if I don’t find a job.

What’s the silver lining? I did not see it at the time, but I kept looking for more volunteer opportunities because I couldn’t see other ways that can effectively maximize my chance to get hired.

I had little control over if organizations would ship my work or not, but I could get more projects to increase the possibility of success while improving my skills - I still believe this is the way to grow today. Since I did not have the chance to take alternative routes, this is the way I know the best and have worked for me.

Now, I want to talk about the silver lining in retrospective. As a student, I gained visceral understanding about what it’s like working with a founder, a product manager, and developers. The insights from the seemingly fruitless work have guided me making career decisions that opened doors to many opportunities in my current role.

In the last four years, I have been working as the sole product designer in my team at Stanford University. My team faces similar challenges many startups do. I thank the early lessons I learned from working on anything I can to enable me to stay calm, and to focus my energy on maximizing what I could contribute. Most recently, my team’s EdTech project received the recognition by Don Norman Design Award.

Back to the time when I was in graduate school. I learned these valuable things after my first few volunteer projects:

1. I like the creative opportunities the chaos affords every team member in a startup environment. It was both stressful and exhilarating. I learned I could handle the stress, so I knew working for startups is a viable option for me after graduating.

2. I saw plenty of real examples of “design constraints”, which I had only read about but never encountered in classrooms. Surprisingly to me, they are not trivial at all. I began to learn-in-action how constraints impacted my design decisions.

3. I learned about the behaviors that are rewarded in a startup environment. Beyond doing the assigned jobs well, spontaneously addressing problems and solving the said problems are highly valued. This is because very early-stage startups often have never-ending tasks than people who can do them. In addition, many problematic situations have not become tasks yet because either no one can identify them, or knows how to address them. If you can do both well, you are doing your team a favor to clear the barriers outside everyone’s expertises. You will be rewarded with more responsibilities, which equals to growth opportunities if you are early in your career.

4. I realized I don’t have to be an expert to solve any problems. I just need to have the patience to learn unfamiliar subjects, and figure out how to apply the knowledge to change the outcome. It is liberating. I learned early that the ability to learn is a versatile skill that can be transferred to contributing value in any job. Since I work on EdTech product, I’d like to elaborate in a future post from the learning science perspective on why and how to develop learning skills when AI is fast advancing. Message me if you have specific questions.

That’s all. Besides the bright side, there is the dark side of being exploited as early career starters. I won’t get deep into it in this post, but I think this is a very personal choice because how much we can take on is highly dependent on our life circumstances. Find people who have gone through what you are going through right now. Ask them why they did what they did, weighing the pros and cons in the context of your current circumstances, then make the choice that’s right for you. Reflect on your experience as you go along with your decision, and find out if it is working well for you.

Comment or message me if any of this relates to you. I want to meet more people who are pondering these aspects of their design career.