The field of user experience has expanded to many different roles over the past few decades. Many new opportunities for career growth have come along with this expansion of UX. While the breadth of opportunities provides flexibility to practitioners, it also makes it challenging to assess growth.
Our previous research assessing organizations’ Design Operations efforts showed that 89% of teams did not have a documented career ladder for UX professionals, and only 18% had advancement pathways outside managerial roles. Because of these dismal statistics, we conducted further qualitative research to understand existing pathways for career progression in UX and their desirability amongst practitioners.
This research aimed to provide guidance for UX practitioners looking to make sense of how their careers evolve over time. Since UX practitioners come from many different backgrounds, growth in the field will look different for everyone.
Our Research
This study aimed to answer the following high-level research questions:
- What are the expectations of UX practitioners surrounding career growth, both in their organizations and the field as a whole?
- How do UX practitioners measure their own growth and progress?
- How can organizations provide clear paths for UX-career growth?
- How does having (or not having) a clear path for growth affect the morale of UX practitioners?
Due to the breadth of these questions, several research methods were used:
- Desk research, involving an analysis of existing career ladders — also referred to as role grids, tracks, levels, or career paths — in UX and adjacent fields
- Cognitive-mapping sessions with 7 UX practitioners
- Remote interviews with 4 UX practitioners
- A survey of 465 UX practitioners
The journey of this research led us down several paths:
- Desk research enabled us to understand what progression models the industry currently offers practitioners.
- Cognitive mapping allowed us to hear how practitioners felt about progression models and how they envision their own career growth.
- Interviews revealed that traditional career ladders were seen as limiting, prompting us to shift our focus toward promoting individual and flexible growth tracking.
- A large-scale survey further emphasized the pain points of practitioners when it comes to tracking growth.
The varied methodologies brought a more comprehensive understanding of UX career progression, making space for more tailored and flexible approaches to career growth.
Existing Career Ladders
Our desk research uncovered two typical UX-career ladders in organizations: the management path and the individual-contributor path. Our respondents frequently referred to these career paths in their responses to our questions.
Career Progression: Mental Models
We asked each participant in the study — whether they participated in a cognitive-mapping session, interview, or survey — to define career progression in UX. This question was interpreted differently by different people. Most answers fell into one or more of the following categories:
- Signals of career growth
- Characteristics of the career-growth process
- Typical career paths
1. Signals of Career Growth
Many respondents identified one or more signals of advancement in their careers. Alongside traditional ways of thinking about career growth — title change, increase in pay, moving to a new industry or organization, and so on — respondents also mentioned:
- A specific skill or set of skills gained
- Being recognized by team members as an expert
- Taking on more strategic responsibilities
- An increase in trust or freedom from leadership
- More confidence in their work
Since most survey respondents did not use specific tools for assessing their career progression, many of these signals were judged subjectively or based on rubrics provided by their organizations.
2. Characteristics of the Process
While signals of growth were the most widely reported from respondents, many definitions included one or more descriptors of the career-progression process. The overwhelming sentiment from this category of definitions was that growth in UX is not clearly defined and haphazard in nature.
Non-linear, with some trial and error. Difficult if there’s no formal guidance or mentorship. And having a variety of levels and labels across companies doesn’t help either.
I don’t have a clear understanding of the differentiation between ‘junior,’ ‘senior,’ ‘principal,’ ‘lead,’ or other job levels/distinctions. This has introduced a level of imposter syndrome as I try to clarify where my skill set lies relative to others and makes it difficult to evaluate job titles/descriptions effectively.
Others described the need to be self-driven to advance in the UX profession, since there is no formal career ladder adopted by the field. And, because technology is constantly changing, the responsibilities of UX professionals are continuously evolving to keep up. This makes it difficult for UX professionals to know which new skills to build.
Opinions were split when categorizing career progression in UX as fast or slow. Those that described the process as slow discussed feeling unappreciated by their organizations, stagnant at one level, or limited in their options to move forward, especially early in their careers. In contrast, those that described career progression as fast cited high demand for UX, quick promotions within their organizations, and the ability to pick up on fundamentals quickly.
3. Typical Paths Available
Most interview participants and survey respondents described nonlinear growth paths dependent on the organization and the professional’s individual interests. A few respondents mentioned strict organizational hierarchies and office politics that defined more-linear pathways.
In order to progress any further within my career, I would need to move to the product development and engineering path or switch companies. I find that once you have reached senior level or above, UX overall is relatively limited in the direction and opportunities for advancement within and across companies.
Career progression in UX is highly nonlinear and self-driven. I’ve met too many professionals who’ve switched to different parts of UX that I’d say it’s hard to define what the career path looks like that isn’t company specific.
Many responses discussed having to decide whether to go down the individual-contributor path or the management path. Since numerous organizations still equate growth with progressing into management roles, the lack of nonmanagerial growth options felt limiting to those who wanted to be involved in strategic or focused UX work.
It stops at a certain level within the government, unless you want a supervisory role.
There are a lot of different ways people can grow in their UX careers. There are many different areas of expertise in UX from strategy and research to interaction design, visual design, design systems, etc. For some, their progression is to grow into people management; for others that want to continue as an individual contributor, their growth looks different. There needs to be clear paths forward for both.
One survey respondent suggested that career progression should be focused on impact to the organization or team in specific areas:
Some individuals are great at teamwork; some want to delve deeper and become experts in a specific area; others are influential and great at leading; and some others prefer to work alone as individual contributors. We need to redefine career progression based on the increasing value that an individual can contribute to the organization or teams they work for.
A few respondents mentioned the role of luck in their career progression — whether they were trusted to take on a big project early on or found themselves in the right place at the right time.
Takeaways
In our research, many practitioners cited career progression in UX as difficult, stagnant, slow, or undefined. While there were also positive reactions, the adverse reactions outnumbered the positive. These frustrations were due to company-specific processes, lack of clear definitions in the UX field, and the inflexible linear view of career progression in many organizations.
This career progression research has four clear takeaways:
- Career progression is dependent on the individual. While it’s essential to align yourself to company metrics to measure your growth, you should not use those metrics as your only measure of career growth, as they won’t set you up for success outside of that specific company. Create a definition of career progression that is unique to you.
- You don’t need to go into management to progress in the field. Think about how your work impacts your team and the organization to understand how you affect the business. Speaking about your increasing impact on the business will give you more leverage in growth-related conversations with leadership.
- Some aspects of growth are not easily measured. While some attributes of growth can be used as a checklist — gain a skill, get promoted to a new role — others are based on feelings and emotions, such as increased confidence and feeling trusted to take on new responsibilities. Though they are more challenging to measure with numbers, tracking how these feelings change over time is important.
- There isn’t a straightforward way to track individual career growth. More research is needed to better understand tools and frameworks for tracking career progression individually and within organizations.
