Junior Designers, Don’t Accept The Job Offer Without Asking These Questions
The excitement of getting a job offer is really something. You feel validated, valued, and totally ready to ditch “funemployment”. And in this environment (2024) , maybe you want to just accept the job offer. But, if you find yourself in a situation where you have the opportunity to be choosy, these are the questions I would ask.
What processes or opportunities are there for me to learn side by side with other designers?
Design is a multi-faceted job and that means some of your peers will be better at certain skills than others. This question aims to ask how the culture fosters mentorship and knowledge sharing between each other. I find a lot of design skills learned are situational too. For example, seeing how to respond to critical feedback that you disagree with is a skill best seen for yourself and practiced. What skills help you discern feedback? Is there good framing technique you can use to know what feedback you will act on versus thanking the person for their input and leaving it be?
I really think that anyone on your team has a valuable and unique perspective to help you shape your design skills. Mentorship is not exclusive to leads and seniors. Juniors and mids have a lot of knowledge to share and can shape design culture as much as they desire to.
What is the biggest challenge the design team faces now?
Is it an internal or external challenge? This question aims to give you insight on where you fit in to contribute in solving this problem and how much you can impact here. If it is a leadership challenge, that is beyond your discretion. But, if it is a challenge of prioritization as a product team, this can be where you show your initiative to share with them product frameworks , such as opportunity trees. Asking this question helps you gauge the blocker in the design team feeling successful and it could help you gauge if that challenge is something you think would slow down your growth.
What does the team do to foster experimentation and ownership of that?
Maybe word this question better than I am, but as a junior designer, there should be space given to innovate. And with innovation means taking a risk on a design decision or ux strategy. How does this team encourage or approach experimentation and not doing things as they have been done. And asking about ownership, I think is helpful too because whether the experiment goes well or takes a left turn, would you be supported in it and ultimatly own a project from beginning to end? This would make for an impressive portfolio and set you up for success during promotion season.
I really want to see companies take a risk and post more junior roles again.
As someone who got her first role in UX due to a company posting a junior / mid role on LinkedIn, I definitely recognize the value of this.
The main perk of hiring a junior is that you get to grow talent. And when you grow talent, you usually have a higher tenure from people who started with you. Conversely, hiring senior talent, you have a much greater risk of losing them after a year or two.
And with all recruiting, it costs that salary and a half to hire for the role your team is looking for.
Juniors are also highly resourceful and can add a refreshing perspective to your organization’s processes, my manager can attest that I definitely added some new team rituals to the design team.
Thanks for reading!
