How do you choose your first design job?
Three basic questions to guide your decision
A smart, young candidate asked me this question on the other day, “How do you decide between different opportunities?” She had a couple great offers to consider. Here’s how I answered, with a few afterthoughts:
- Where will you learn the most? If you are at the beginning of your career, that’s the most important question to ask. Careers are long, broken into lots of phases. Ideally your first job will provide the foundation for the opportunities that follow. In my first job I learned how to code (html was simple back then), the basics of information architecture and how to turn all those wireframes to intuitive UI. You’ll have to go deep, and become a specialist in a few disciplines, before you develop any sort of “T-shape”.
- Who will you be working with? Who will be your manager, your mentor, and your peers? Those will be the people who coach you, who collaborate with you and push you to make your work better. It’s important to know who they are. Hopefully you met a good cross-section of them in your interviews. You’ll learn more from your co-workers than you ever did at art school.
- What will you be working on? Will you have a valued role on the team? Will the product or project have a positive impact on people or the world? Hopefully, each project either builds your skills or puts something good out in the world. Does the work fit how you want to grow your career?
If you have good, clear answers to those questions, you probably have what you need to make a decision. And if you have multiple offers* that answer those questions well, you’re in a very good place. In that case, choose based on the office coffee, and the proximity to a good art store.
*Important Note: If you don’t have multiple offers, don’t worry. Just get started at doing anything that uses your skills. My first design job was hand-drawing headlines for the coupons that fall out of the Sunday paper, but damn it, I sure got good at drawing type.
