Stop expecting to hire miracle workers.

I generally only rant online ‘bout once a year (I think). People who know me know I rant all the time. I hope to think it’s because I’m driven, passionate, and I want to do things right. I also try to provide solutions for the subject of the ranting (I think).

But for the following rant, I don’t really see an immediate solution.

I consider myself a T-shaped person. As a service/UX designer I like to believe I know enough about just about anything surrounding my profession and beyond. I know about coding and the challenges of front-end design. I suck at motion and visual design but I believe I know and love it enough to be able to provide well-founded input and feedback to someone who does excel in this. I know about development and development flows. I know about system architecture, SEO, marketing, CRO, AR, AI, strategy and business shizzle… Alongside my industry and soft skills, I consider all of those additional crossover skills essential for being able to perform the job as a service/UX designer.

It’s hard work keeping up with all of this. It requires re-energising continuously. Curiosity and enthusiasm get me a long way. I have chosen the “digital” playing field and with that choice comes the obligation of keeping up and staying up-to-date. Aside from “making a difference” for people, it’s a big part of what I love about my profession.

So what am I venting about then?! What’s with the long introduction… What got me so fired up that, for those very few times I’m tempted to post something on here, I talk about this kind of stuff? Because more and more I see job postings for UX designers passing by on LinkedIn where the requirements are just silly.

UX Design is an extremely broad field. There are the soft skills where communication, empathy, curiosity, etc. are so important. There are the industry skills like research, prototyping, designing, testing. And there are the crossover skills that allow you to understand enough about everything around you to take that into account when building a service or improving the UX of a touchpoint.

But owning enough of those crossover skills and being able to include that knowledge for a good UX or service design track is not the same as “being experienced” in it.

And that is exactly what I’m seeing in those job postings. People are looking for “an experienced UX designer” who incidentally also can do the visual design and hey, now that we’re at it, you can translate that visual design into a working digital product while you’re at it, right? Bit of React here and there hasn’t hurt anyone?

Personally, I’m not impacted by this. But I think about all of those people who are starting out in this field. I’m also thinking about how demeaning this is for all of the people who indeed are experts in their field. Heck, I love seeing an experienced front-end designer at work. They bring a design to life, they do it in a graceful way and construct their stuff in such a manner that everything works properly on just about any device and screen size. They solve thousands of little issues and quirks that are not described in the wireframes, or static designs, or prototypes. They introduce micro-animations and infuse screen transitions with motion where half a second and a motion curve this or that way means the product appears fast and happy, or stately and trustable. I love and respect “experts” in their field.

Being “T-shaped” means you are an “expert” in something but you have the ability to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than your own. It does not mean “Hey there unicorn pony, you can do it all can’t yah? With the rainbow and sprinkly things and such?!”

Unfortunately more and more companies are looking for that unicorn. And as I mentioned in the beginning of my rant. This time, I don’t really see a direct solution. It’s a culture shift that needs to happen. But where? At the companies? They probably don’t know any better. Perhaps this is a job for quality recruitment firms who take their job seriously. Perhaps they can talk some sense into the companies they work for? Pointing out that they will only get “mediocrity” if they ask for all of it, and help them to define what the concrete skills are that will benefit them in their needs. Perhaps this rant alone might change the minds of a few people out there…

I guess that’s what makes me so angry. The fact that I simply do not know how to solve this puppy.

Oh, look… Carrot cake’s ready. Rant is over. Gotta go…