I am very lucky to have met almost all my career milestones at the intended timelines that I planned for. All things considered, I think I can call myself pretty successful* compared to my peers of similar background.

*I hope I don’t jinx myself. Because I know success is very fleeting and I’m still early in the game.

No one would have saw this coming; I was never on the director’s list when I was in design school, I didn’t graduate as a valedictorian, and I still haven’t won any awards. I also didn’t go to university.

And yet, I am blessed to have consistently found amazing jobs working for companies I believe in (a common enough pattern in my resume), and I have 3k people(and counting) reading my thoughts on design on Medium.

People reach out to me often to ask me how I got to where I currently am. But that usually begs more questions than answers because what people want to find out is how they can apply the success themes in my story to guide themselves to their own success.

I am usually bad at giving that answer verbally at the top of my head, so I’ve decided to textually record how I translate my approach and knowledge into an actionable career strategy that has brought me mostly happiness and growth.

Things you should know about my personality first

Before I dive into my actual framework, I think it is important to take notes about my personality. Personality affects how someone approaches problems and decide on solutions. Because of my personality, I understand that my methods and ways of working are not suited for everyone.

I have many opinions

I’m a pretty opinionated person. One of my lecturers described me as a person who dares to love and dares to hate （“敢爱，敢恨”）and I think that is the perfect summary of who I am.

I always lean towards forming my own opinion rather than following the herd or blindly accepting what is told to me. I am someone who confronts emotions in order to make logical conclusions about topics that I care about.

The importance of awareness

I like being informed. I like to read up about the current trends in the world and think about how it affects me as an individual. I like to develop a (mostly neutral) perspective about people and things.

I am someone who constantly seeks knowledge for self-awareness, so ‘forbidden’ or controversial opinions are my favourite to read. If you’ve watched “The Matrix”, I basically take red pills whenever possible.

No bullshit

I’ve always had a very low tolerance to bullshit. I have gotten into so much trouble calling out crap from adults and seniors, but ultimately the wise will know that I am right about some things and take in my perspectives.

If there is something fishy or suspicious, you can be sure I’ll call it out or make my exit from the situation if it cannot be fixed. Life, and our careers, is too short to waste time dealing with bad people and bad environments.

The advice I give myself that I’m now giving to you

This is by no means a guide to success or a guarantee that your career will work out better if you follow what I write. It is just what worked for me personally.

I’ve worked with a lot of other designers and professionals, I’ve mentored many juniors, so I think I’ve seen a lot that most people don’t. Point is, while I believe my advice is pretty solid, take it with a grain of salt still.

Don’t follow the money

Let’s be real, a lot of people come into UX because of greed. While you can paint a rosy picture that passion is why you’re here, the real motivator for many is the money.

This is ultimately a career mistake many people make, from junior to senior level.

When you follow the money, you only work for the money. And that ultimately stops you from pivoting to a role that would give you growth opportunities that would eventually lead you to a much bigger salary bump.

I’ve seen my fair share of designers making initially high figures at their day-job, and ultimately staying at the same place for years because of the salary they have, and very often, they grow complacent and their salaries eventually stagnate below market.

Complacency makes you stagnant, and stagnant skillsets make you incredibly unattractive to hire. The two main consequences I see from following the money is this:

1. Designers’ salary expectations are mismatched with their skills and the market

2. Designers losing opportunities to land a job that has huge growth potential for their careers

I’m not saying money isn’t important, because I do understand the need to pay the bills. But after analysing my compensation over the years, it’s pretty safe to say that the notion of doing what helps you grow will lead you to a shiny pot of gold.

I think it’s better to be paid what you deserve than to be grossly overpaid. Recruiters and hiring managers do question your salary expectations and benchmark it with your skills and experience. And the increasing amount of overpaid tech professionals today is probably why lay-offs are so commonplace currently.

Having more money may not always be a good thing, so don’t let greed consume you.

Always aim for growth

It sounds obvious, but this is not commonly practiced by many professionals because it is a difficult thing to do.

When I left my first full-time job at a banking institute, the HR was shocked. “Why Melody?” she asks, genuinely concerned. And I hung my head to admit that I didn’t feel like they would let me grow fast enough. While they have an amazing career pathway plan setup for all employees, it was too slow for me. Plus, it was too much of a protected environment.

And so, I went off to struggle working at start-ups in industries and spaces that I am not familiar with. It didn’t seem worth it at first, but it paid off within a year because I got to work on things many people didn’t.

That led me to a big salary bump (much more than what the bank offered to get me to stay, and what I consider my first big break) and me pivoting into being a product and service designer instead of staying in the UX space.

People have different strategies for growth. Many like to use money to buy courses to make up for gaps in their technical skills. While you can buy your way out of a lack of skillsets, you cannot buy your way out of a lack of experience.

Especially when you turn senior, your lack of experience will be criticised and scrutinised far more than when you are junior. Put yourself on the better side of that situation by collecting evidence that you practice a growth mindset.

Be it changing your jobs, exploring new industries or taking on more responsibilities at work: Don’t be afraid of how hard the work might get. Because that’s how you level-up and earn your keep for the future.

Don’t look for jobs to apply to, look for companies you want to work for

It’s very easy to go on a job board and start applying to opportunities that are available. After all, it is a framework that makes sense; if there is a job, you apply for it. Job boards make the searching of opportunities easy.

But it is also the method that everyone else goes to. Job boards bring a lot of visibility to sponsored listings, and ultimately just increases the amount of competition within a role you’re applying in.

I like to reverse the process by looking for companies I want to work at, then looking to see if they have positions open.

This means looking at the list of upcoming start-ups, the list of Fortune 500 companies and digging into whether they are the right fit for me.

If they are, I take a peep at their careers page and see if there’s a hit. If there is, I apply directly there.

This process has gotten me more replies and successful conversions in my application funnel than applying on job boards. It also gives me a list of companies I aim to be employed at in the future, so my long-term career trajectory is exciting and full of things to look forward to.

Know what you value at a workplace

You will spend at least 35.7% of your conscious time at work*. So it’s not far-fetched to want to work somewhere with a culture that fits your lifestyle and goals.

*Assuming that you work a 5 day work week, 8 hours a day and sleep 8 hours every night. Not calculating travel time and overtime.

It doesn’t matter what other people tell you to value at work. Success is loosely and incorrectly defined by compensation and company size, so screw following that conventional opinion of what others think your success should look like.

You define your values; you’re the only person that understands your needs and can make yourself happy. It’s unrealistic to wait for a company to satisfy you, and it’s unrealistic to have the same values as others because you are your own person.

This is my list of values that are non-negotiable for any workplace that wants to hire me today:

1. Openness and transparency. I expect clear and timely communication from management and team members.
2. Accountability. We will all make mistakes, and I expect that we don’t sweep them under the rug and we address it so we can move forward with improvements.
3. Flexibility. I’m at a point of my life where I’m making a lot of personal adjustments. Companies must allow me the autonomy and flexibility at work, if not it’s just going to end badly.

That is my list, but ultimately what yours would look like can be very different from what I have. A lot of juniors I mentor value mentorship and growth, and some peers value compensation over flexibility. There is no right or wrong answer.

You have to figure out what you want and apply that filter when looking out for opportunities.

Know when to quit

It’s important to know and admit when something is not working out and leave a situation that is not benefiting you.

I remember joining a company because they promised growth and assistance to help me out with my personal milestones. They did not fulfill that promise, and even went as far as to attempt to sabotage my career and making me an enemy when I resigned.

“Go ahead and quit, no one is going to hire you because you didn’t stay at the company for long enough.”

I internally flipped a finger at my manager, and handed over my letter of resignation. I didn’t get a new job immediately, but my short tenure at companies was never questioned by future prospective employers*.

*I was questioned about it once, but that company quickly proved to be one that I would not want to work for. I went through interviews with dozens of companies, and the companies I do want to work at question how they can make me stay. Now that’s perspective.

A lot of professionals have a misconception that your median tenure at companies will affect your candidacy at future companies, and basically use that fear to stay at their current workplaces for longer to “meet a minimum time frame to look better”.

I say staying when you know there’s a misfit will only harm your chances further, because you’re blocking yourself from growth and opportunities during that time of survival.

The 6 months you stay at a harmful work environment (for the sake of it) is probably 6 months of growth and impact you’re throwing into the trash bin. You can’t get that time back.

Companies that question a candidate’s loyalty are companies that look at employee retention wrongly. Just because a candidate stayed at their previous employers for long, it doesn’t mean the same timeframe will be applied to them. That’s entitlement.

If you have a crap retention model, bad culture and other red flags, you can’t expect the same loyalty to be bestowed upon you.

Be braver about your career decisions, and never settle. You don’t have to stay somewhere that’s not good for you simply to make a “better” impression.

When something is wrong and cannot be fixed, look out for your next opportunity so you can make your exit from the situation.

Don’t listen to people

This is ironic, since I’m here writing advice, yet I’m telling people to not listen to them, but the statement still stands. Do not listen to people. Because only you know yourself best.

When I first started my design career, I was very lost and unsure what to do. Many mentors and senior professionals made a bunch of suggestions based on what worked out for them.

Join an agency, stay at the bank, start your own design practice; While these advice did come from goodwill and a genuine desire to help me, they weren’t going to work out for me because I know none of those options will fulfill my needs.

Coming from a very conservative Asian household, the common strategy was just to follow the herd and play the game long-term. If I had listened to the advice given to me, knowing that it was ill-suited to my personality, I would be very unhappy and unfulfilled today*.

*I won’t deny the possibility of being successful, but it wasn’t my definition of success, hence I would be a miserable person.

As far as success goes, only you know yourself well enough to define it. No amount of great advice from the best design professionals will magically lift up your career. You need to be in control of your decisions and be very clear what you want and what you can achieve.

The amount of noise that LinkedIn and mentoring platforms create would only pull you further away from what you truly want. While I appreciate that you can connect with other professionals and mentors easier than it was a few years ago, most of the time it’s just best to not listen to what others have to say — They are just distractions, even if it comes from good intentions.

Key decisions I’ve made during my career

Here’s where it gets personal. I initially didn’t want to share this because I question how useful it is for others to know of my journey in detail, but since it was a common talking point of many I’ll just save most of you the trouble from messaging me about it.

Freelance solo to full-time enterprise

I was a very successful freelancer when I started my design career. This resulted in me almost starting my own design agency before I turned 20, but I decided to take a risk and a huge pay-cut to join an in-house design team as a junior.

It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. While the money was honestly sad, I got to learn from extremely knowledgeable seniors and stakeholders, and added enterprise-level design experience into my profile. Plus I wasn’t as burned out as when I was a freelancer.

The experience made me very sought after even as a junior. I had no shortage of job offers after I decided to leave the enterprise, and even today, a lot of the designs I’ve done during that time are still relevant enough to be used as portfolio work.

Enterprise to start-up

My love for start-ups is unexplainable. There is just something about working in a fast-paced, semi-disorganised environment that really makes my creative brain tick.

Again, when I made this switch, it was yet another initial paycut. This was a time where I tried replicating successful design practices from enterprise to scale start-ups. While most of the start-ups didn’t make IPO, every experience was a valuable one because I got direct knowledge of how start-ups work from funding, implementation and growth.

I thought I would stop working at start-ups before I turned 25, but that didn’t happen because the experiences I’ve had at start-ups just proved to be too valuable because of my passion in new technologies and the impact that I get to make.

I know many people have had terrible experiences at start-ups, and me too, but the learnings I get from them is so immense that when I look back at them a few years after, I never have any regrets about them.

Relocation to Europe

Yet another financial suicide mission, my relocation to Europe was an extremely costly one with yet another paycut plus the cost (or investment) to move my entire life here.

Europe is honestly scary. The amount of talented designers here is probably a few thousand times more than back home. Having experienced two intensive job searches here, I know the competition for talent here is tougher than in Singapore*.

*I mean, I’m a local back home and an immigrant here so it’s naturally tougher. But still.

All that aside, I am here to learn. The world is a gigantic place, and I want to make sure my practice is holistic not just technically, but also culturally. There is so much to learn about how other regions practice design, and I am so thankful to be here despite the newfound fear of the possibility of getting deported.

Closing thoughts

While this article doesn’t provide you direct action points of what to do for your career (and it shouldn’t), I hope it inspires some introspection about where you’re currently at and how you can make your situation better for you.

Most of us will work at companies that either suck or are just okay, it’s inevitable. We can’t always have wins in our careers; people who always do are either incredibly lucky or privileged. We can’t compare ourselves blindly to other people’s successes.

What we can do, though, is to build a pathway for ourselves where we can be both successful and happy by our own standards. You have to define what it means to have a meaningful career, and ultimately take the steps to attain that purpose in your work.

These are my honest advice, and my story as a designer navigating the industry. I hope what I’ve shared is helpful to you and as always, I’m wishing you the best in your career.