Without having a clear growth path, it's hard to manage one's design career as effectively as possible.
Yet the frameworks behind the individual contributor and manager tracks are often non-existent at entry level UX maturity design team, and not released to the public by large companies. To address this, Peter Merholz created a valuable framework for assessing designer levels, which has been adopted by several of my peers who are design managers and executives. Peter's original content is here.
I reformatted this framework in a trimmed down, visually organized way that is optimized for widescreen presentation slides in Keynote, PowerPoint, and Google Slides.
Here's my take on the Designer Levels framework, which I have checked against my past experience. It primarily focuses on individual contributors and scales from Junior Designer up to VP of Design:
I reformatted this framework in a trimmed down, visually organized way that is optimized for widescreen presentation slides in Keynote, PowerPoint, and Google Slides.
Here's my take on the Designer Levels framework, which I have checked against my past experience. It primarily focuses on individual contributors and scales from Junior Designer up to VP of Design:
I also adapted the framework for Design Management Levels, which I have checked against my experience as a Design Manager and Executive at multiple design firm from the startup (Birchbox) to large tech corporation like Oracle:
I’ve found this framework valuable for seeing where I can work with my managers, mentors, coaches, and peers to grow my career. It also helps me evaluate the levels of the designers I work with, and where I can help them grow.
And other interesting to perform is to assess the skills of your teams in order to spot where improvements should be worked on and training provided to your team's members. It is also interesting to have this skills matrices filled both by your team members and the mangers and to compare the resulsts. It gives a clear pictures of your team and what area you should focus on.
