User Experience for a Better World

Career path for UX team?

Has anyone ever put together a career progression chart, or a career plan, for UX team members?

I have recently assembled my first three-person UX team -- it consists of 1 usability tester/prototype designer, 1 graphic designer/UI developer, and 1 UI developer/prototyper.

I'd like to be able to map out the various levels of career advancement for each of us, especially since we will be expanding this group in the coming months.

I'd really appreciate any help you can provide on this.

Thanks,
Jere

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Permalink Reply by David Jarvis on July 21, 2010 at 1:24pm

I don't think you can have a defined career path in user experience as there are so many options.

The way I have done this in the past is to talk about "competencies". The key UX competencies to me (ymmv) are:
IA & interaction design
Content & writing
Visual design & branding
Front end coding
User testing & user research

Clearly not everyone can be good at everything, so it is a question of talking about which direction someone wants to head in, where there current competencies are, and what additional competencies do they require to achieve their goal.

Then as that person's manager you can define how you can support their efforts, either by getting them on relevant projects, sending them to extra curricular gigs, formal training and so on.

HTH
DJ

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Daske on July 28, 2010 at 3:08am

I just want to answer with some interesting links:

A way to assess the competencies of UX teams that you might use to identify missing skills in your team: http://www.uie.com/articles/assessing_ux_teams/
A model of UX experience levels: http://tinyurl.com/adaptive-path-ux-leadership
A presentation on "design leadership" with some interesting thoughts on career paths: http://www.slideshare.net/frogdesign/work-in-progress-thoughts-on-d...

If you don't know the site yet, you might also want to ask this question at www.uxexchange.com -- In my experience there's more activity there than here. One Question there was similar to yours: http://uxexchange.com/questions/3368/conferences-and-training

Lizz