I wrote a while ago that designers shouldn’t fall into the UX generalist trap, and that article was targeted specifically at struggling, unemployed UX professionals and junior designers for 2022’s bullish hiring market.

It didn’t sit well with me after; while I know specialising or framing your unique offerings will help you get employment now, the technicalities of this strategy doesn’t really make sense.

There technically is no such thing as generalist or specialist design role, and the only thing that really makes a designer successful is their ability to do the different types of work and deliver.

I specialise, but I am also a ‘generalist’

Those that went to stalk me on my LinkedIn profile would know that I primarily dabble in Fintech, and that industry is seems like my specialisation for product design.

But in my previous job hunt, I was offered positions in other industries like Edtech and enterprise innovation. Both of which I am more than competent enough to take on as a professional.

I am a digital product designer, but I am also capable of doing research, copy, UI and strategy topics. I can also do a bit of visual design, and from my background in industrial design, I can also design a bit of 3D and physical products.

So am I a specialised generalist? (That doesn’t make much sense.)

Roles aren’t specialist, they just carry preferences

As part of the hiring team of my previous companies, coming up with transparent JDs and a fair way to assess candidates is one of the things that made me reflect on this topic a bit more deeply.

Many roles are written with a lot of thought, stating where the role would sit and the expectations the future designers will need to meet. And after a few recent interviews, it’s pretty clear to me that the background of designers don’t really matter if they show that they are competent to do the work.

The preferences just help instill confidence and attract designers from certain groups with certain experiences, but that doesn’t mean we would select someone based on matching background alone.

Does that mean specialising is a waste of effort then? (The answer is no.)

Our influences from engineering

The biggest thing that bothers me about design, especially design in tech, is how quickly we mirror the processes and frameworks of engineers. Now, I don’t see it as a bad thing, but I do wonder if we’re losing ourselves by being too close to engineering practices.

Take our recruiting practices for example: Design assignments are definitely inspired by engineering take-homes, and whiteboarding sessions are basically a mirror to live coding tests.

It seems like design is just mimicking the engineering industry, and the impact of this seeps deeper into the career decisions we are currently making.

Our jobs are now based off what engineers are building and the career pathways they walk on. If engineers are specialising, does that mean designers also have to as well?

Oversupply of designers focusing on tech

As someone who started my career in tech and seen people struggle transitioning into tech companies, I can safely say that working in tech is not for everyone.

It’s such an over-hyped industry for various reasons, the misconception of our salaries being one of them, and our ways of working another.

Working in tech companies, particularly in start-ups, is a volatile career move. You’ll never know what’s going to be the trending design specialisation companies would like to hire, and when the focuses change, you’re expected to keep up with it.

Due to it’s ever-changing nature, some of you are literally not suited to work in tech because it’s not an environment you thrive in.

And it’s not something you can learn — sure, you can learn to survive in tech for the money, but thriving in it and finding purpose in the tech industry needs a level of affinity and passion that cannot be bought or taught.

Despite so, you don’t see designers applying their design skills professionally in non-tech settings, likely because they fear missing out on the hypothetical six-figure salary that only the top 1% or those living in high-cost cities get.

Your obsession with being in the tech industry might be sabotaging your growth as a designer, because it’s just not the environment some of you naturally thrive in.

Will taking a step back from tech help you figure out your career better then?

More questions than answers

I started to seek answers by figuring it out what it means to thrive in a design practice. And the answer is not as simple as picking a specialisation or generalising your skills.

Skills, industry, technology and market; designers have a lot of considerations when it comes to making career choices. Each consideration is unique to every person, and no two person can have the exact same pathway.

Choosing a design path is like creating a DnD character

For those of you who don’t play MMORPGs or are into Dungeons & Dragons, the reference here is that you get to customise your playable character at the start of the game.

The start of your design career is like the character creation screen. You get to choose which class you want to belong to (Designer, Researcher, Visual) and you get a limited amount of skill points to invest in different skills.

When you first start out, you’re going to be a terrible designer with limited honed skills. As you gain more experience, you get more skill points to allocate strategically based on your goals, and even upgrade your job title to something else more specialised if you want (Quant researcher, product designer, motion designer).

Generalising and specialising falls into this strange grey area where one is not better than the other; the only way to determine if you’ve built a good character (or in this case, career) is how well it would float in different market situations.

Bull and bear market of employment is based on industry, not roles

In my previous article, I did mention the practical advice of following where the work is. Nick made an insightful comment about how in a bullish market, employers would be able to afford specialist roles, and in a bearish market, we will see more generalist roles.

To really commit to this theory, I went to scrape some data on a job board* (5000+ jobs from one country) and analysed it to see if this were true.

*To avoid lawsuits or any legal implications I’m not sharing or even giving a preview of the data sets.

The quantitative analysis of the data basically states that there are currently more generalist roles than specialist roles, so one of the conclusions we can come up with, from the original hypothesis, is that we’re in a bear market of employment right now.

But wait, generalist roles will always be in abundance compared to specialist roles. That is just what makes sense for most companies looking to optimise their design workflow. It doesn’t make sense to have single designers in separate taskflows, as that’s more headcount and more paychecks to sign.

Something that I’ve noticed from my data set is that there are more industries willing to hire product / UX designers now. Design opportunities in auto, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and gaming were pretty uncommon, but they currently exist in larger numbers today.

So the new theory is that the bull market provides more opportunities in ‘new’ industries for designers, and offers some opportunity for specialist roles for designers who want to take a break from generalising.

So you can’t actually be a specialist designer long-term, you can only be a generalist designer in a specialised industry. And in a bull market, you just get more chances to find work in cooler industries that aren’t typical digital transformation tasks or website redesigns.

Generalist roles are actually already specialised

What is the most generic and generalised job title a design professional can have?

That’s right: Designer.

But none of us call ourselves just a ‘designer’ in today’s context. We call ourselves product designers, UX researchers, UX writers, visual designers and many other roles that has a keyword in front. Each of those keywords actually highlights a specialisation in design itself.

You cannot expect a visual designer to be well-versed in research, and similarly, you cannot ask a UX writer to come up with visual branding guidelines. We each have a specific set of technical competencies already customised to our roles, so is it our definition of generalists that has changed?

The scope of our jobs are literally defined by our titles. Sure, some product designers might focus occasionally on UI and research if the company needs it, but that was part of our expected scope in the first place. We are expected to cover a generalist set of skills as a designer and perform at the job using those broad skills.

A designer who cannot design effectively will be the first to be kicked to the curb. That’s why design schools teach their students a broad range of technical design skills to ensure that they can graduate to be successfully employed and thriving at work. The ‘specialist’ UX skills that a bootcamp equips you with has constantly been proven to not be enough.

There is no such thing as a designer who only does one set of delegated tasks for their whole career. Design isn’t a manufacturing factory.

Designers are not engineers, so we don’t need to break down the workflow further like they do

I find that there is confusion within the industry about the scope of engineers and designers. For some reason, designers are always compared to engineers, even though our technical scopes and workflows are completely different and we are ultimately two very different groups of professionals.

If an engineer specialises in iOS application development, it’s the equivalent of a designer being able to design based off iOS guidelines. But from a design workflow perspective, it does not make sense to have a designer that only works on iOS designs. A designer would be expected to design for other platforms as well.

This isn’t a double standard, it’s a realistic expectation of technical competencies from technical workflows.

If given the same deadline; an engineer literally cannot code and deploy features for multiple platforms, but a designer can easily mock designs and concepts for multiple features on multiple platforms.

That is why designers are always ahead of engineers, because we can technically work on multiple things in the same timeline. It doesn’t make sense to break down design workflows like engineering ones, then give specialist titles to designers.

So no, we shouldn’t be mimicking engineers in this regard. Designers should be able to do more and learn a broader set of skills to deliver better solutions faster.

Learning more skills and having more technical competencies within your specialisation doesn’t make you a generalist. It just makes you a better designer because of the broadened scope you can cover.

Career strategy is the answer

Everyone’s career will be different depending on where they are based and how the market looks like in their geographical area.

A lot of mentors might urge you to broaden your skillsets, and some would advice to find an industry to specialise in. There is no correct answer to this question, and both are sound advice.

Only by experimenting with your career, you will find out what works for you.

Generalise skills to be technically competent for more jobs, specialise industries to stay an interesting hire.

This is the general strategy or advice I would give to my mentees and my readers today. Is it going to age well? I hope it does, but there is also no guarantee that this would work for every single individual.

Expand your technical competency by learning the skills your employers expect you to have. If you are expected to get good at UI, don’t fight it, go be good at it. If you are expected to do business strategy, don’t whine about having to do it, learn to do it.

When you have the skills companies are looking for, you get to choose what you want to work on and who you want to work for. When you do choose and have been intentional with your career, you will enjoy work a lot more. Plus, introducing yourself as a professional gets so much easier and more interesting during interviews.

I look forward to the day where we can all sit and talk about the unique differences in our careers because we were intentional when practicing it.

Stop looking at American designers

A big problem with career strategy for many designers today is just looking at American designers as a median benchmark of success.

Look, I know how you feel. America, specifically Silicon Valley, is very ahead of the UX and product design game, and it’s great to look up to them to get a sense of where the standards should be. But that doesn’t mean you can deliver the same standard, earn the same salary, and follow the same career path as an American living in a major tech city.

You can follow their footsteps to the inch and still not get anywhere near the results they have. Because like I said, your geographical location matters a lot too.

I have American friends who work in big tech today, and while they are good at what they do, they cannot deny that living in a major tech city was a big reason why their careers took off the way it did.

So stop blindly looking and following only the Americans. Look at the successful designers in your country and pick up the market trends in your city.

Your career strategy is a lot like an investment portfolio. You can copy the same trades as a seasoned investor and not make the same profits.

Analyse your own market, set your goal, and figure out what is the next best thing for you to do in order to get to that goal.

Don’t trap yourself by being complacent

The biggest career mistake I’ve seen my peers make is to stay in their comfort zones professionally. They are happy delivering average designs, getting average salaries, and follow the same strategy of staying at a firm for 2–3 years before moving on for a salary jump.

This pattern can be seen in many resumes, and you will stop growing or being hired anywhere great late-career if everything you ever worked on is conservative and boring.

It’s very difficult to measure complacency, because not everyone is driven enough to sprint through their careers. But I find the majority of design professionals today complacent in the sense that they don’t fight to work on interesting things or deliver interesting outcomes.

I’ve seen some senior resumes only doing digital transformation work for the last 7 years. Sure, that is a specialisation, but digital transformation is a fancy term for digitising forms and processes. As someone who has worked on some of these initiatives, I know for a fact that it is not challenging design work.

And don’t get me started on designers who don’t jump ship if they don’t ship enough things. I have interviewed so many people that have the years of experience clocked in, but have barely delivered more than 3 products* or features in the company they have worked at for years.

*Random number, I don’t know what the average should be but I would always prefer someone who has shipped more than less.

Hiring managers sniff out complacency like a hungry dog smelling for something to eat. You can generalise or specialise, but if you are complacent, you’re going to get chewed immediately.

How I shifted over the last six and a half years

When I first started out, I have to admit that website redesigns and digital transformation was the best use of my (then) unpolished design skills. They allowed me to practice my skills, get paid for my work and get better at what I do visually.

The first 2 years of my career focused on applied design skills. My goal was to practice design as feverishly as I could, get decent enough at it that people would pay me for my work with little question.

It worked. And it was nice to have actual paid professional experience on my resume.

I got bored of designing for digitisation so that’s when I thought about designing products. There were plenty of opportunities, but all came with a paycut.

I decided to take the risk, and focused on designing weird and wonderful products for start-ups back home. It was a great experience for me overall; a test of my design capabilities in real-time, and a very unique track record that not many in Singapore have.

Unintentionally, this made me extremely employable and sought after. So off to an agency I went, winning million-dollar contracts and having more happy clients under my practice.

It seemed like a great career to continue, but I figured out that selling design wasn’t really what I wanted to do, so back to product design I went. Sometimes, you just need to try something before knowing if it’s for you.

It worked in my favour, because product design was in demand, and I got myself an opportunity to relocate to Europe* and that’s where my journey currently continues.

Is moving to Europe a good decision? Only time will tell.

So now you know my story, and I will just leave you to dissect my journey bit by bit so you can see why I made certain decisions, and how my location and the region’s design market affects my career. You’ll also notice how I barely made any sort of decision, I just worked hard and went with the flow.

It was never about generalising or specialising, it’s about getting good at what you do, taking risks, and making decisions. That’s how you make a successful career for yourself, unique to you.

Trying to copy someone else’s pathway would only get you compromised results. Having a successful career isn’t a modern chemistry experiment, it’s theorised physics in an live, ever-changing environment.

Closing thoughts

The simplest answer is almost usually the correct one. This topic was a bane to discuss with my network because everyone had different opinions of what worked and what didn’t. Then the ‘Eureka’ moment came when we realised that we come from different backgrounds, countries, and even generations.

No same strategy can yield the same results if that were the case. And with this article, I’m probably putting a close on this topic of specialisation and generalisation for a while.

Just follow the work, occasionally think about what you want to do, and check if the market has opportunities for you. Don’t waste time figuring out whether to specialise in something or not, your decisions today are not future-proof, and you will be at the mercy of market shifts for as long as you choose to work as a designer.

C’est la vie, just go with the flow, don’t cheat yourself and focus on having a happy life.

Decided to do a haiku this time:

Generalise or
Specialise? The answer is:
don’t make dumb choices.