The Secret Sauce to Boosting Your Career
Marhaban designers,
Picture this: you're a UX designer navigating the treacherous waters of career growth. You're bombarded with advice from every angle, and it feels like you're drowning in a sea of suggestions. What's a designer to do? Enter my trusty career coach, who shared a golden nugget of wisdom that I'm now passing on to you.
In the book "So Good They Can't Ignore You", Cal Newport introduces the concept of "Career Capital." It's the combination of skills, knowledge, and experience you accumulate throughout your career. The more unique and scarce the job opportunity, the more career capital you'll need to snag it.
With this in mind, I posed a question to my career coach: "What can I do to increase my career capital?" He had two main pointers for me:
Obtain impactful assignments
Interact with executives
1. Obtain Impactful Assignments
When you work on an assignment that makes a big splash, it's like adding rocket fuel to your career growth. These impactful projects show off your value and make it a breeze to highlight your accomplishments. You know, the kind of work that has everyone turning their heads, like:
Establishing a new revenue stream
Repositioning the company in the market
Designing that oh-so-sexy new feature everyone's talking about
It's all about getting onto those game-changing projects that put your career on the fast track.
2. Interact with Executives
At first, I was scratching my head at this one. But my career coach clarified: interacting with the higher-ups is a good indicator of your performance and how well you're aligned with the company's goals. Essentially, if you're a top performer working on crucial projects, the execs will want to chat with you. And when that happens, it's a pretty solid sign that you're building up that career capital.
The Bottom Line
In the wild world of UX design, it's easy to get lost in the career growth maze. But by focusing on career capital, you'll be one step closer to finding your way out. So, next time you're swamped with advice, remember these two career-boosting tips: seek out those impactful assignments and see if you can interact with the execs. This will help you be hyper-focus. Now the only questions is how to achieve these two things… Until next time!
Ma’a salama,
Dan