Skip to main content

When Is It Time to Leave Your Current (UX) Job?

Woman sitting on desk with packed box of belongings
Resign photo created by pressfoto - www.freepik.com
I’ve been doing the job of lead for almost 3 years now. Like most companies, mine doesn’t really teach you anything about how to manage. So, I found and just finished this great book, The Successful Manager by James Potter and Mike Kavanagh.  

While the book was really valuable from a management standpoint, to me the most impactful part of the book was Chapter 13: Determining If It Is Time to Leave. I wished I’d had access to this advice long ago when I first started working. My work journey would have been much different.

So here’s the authors’ advice, ask yourself 5 questions about your current job:

  • Do I enjoy the work itself?
  • Do I like the people?
  • Am I fairly/generously paid?
  • Is it meeting my professional development needs?
  • Do I have work-life balance?

If you answer yes to 4 - 5 of these questions, then you’re in great shape. 

If you only answer yes to 3 of these, then it’s time to start putting feelers out, i.e., you should be looking but you don’t have to be in a hurry. 

If you only answer 1 of 2 of these as yes, you should be aggressively job searching.

I’d ask 3 other questions including about the state of UX of the company:
  • Are there political situations that do not look like they are going to get better, that directly affect your ability to do your job or to enjoy the job?
  • If the company is not UX-centered, is it actively trying to incorporate UX across the enterprise?
  • Is the company looking at or has it adopted SAFe agile? (Yes, means you will be miserable. That's a whole other post.)
I also do not believe UX designers should be coaches to let other people do design by committee aka Lean UX. This ignores the years of experience and knowledge designers have in design psychology. (But, you should be bringing your project team into your design work for ideas and input.) So, if the company moves to this type of design, I would consider it a negative. As I always say, if everyone is supposed to be able to do everything on a project team, at what point are you going to let me design the database? 

While not mentioned in the book, you should ask yourself these questions regularly at least every 6 months. Don’t wait until something starts to get bad to ask yourself if it’s time to move.

Sometimes moving isn’t an option because of personal or economic situations. I’ve been there multiple times. If you’re in one of those situations, make a plan for how you’re going to make it through before you can move. Finding something positive at work or outside of work to focus on and sustain you while you wait will help the wait.

It's easy to get complacent in a job, but you should take control of your situation. Answering these questions should help you know when it's time to move.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Doing User Research When You Have No Access to Your Users

For the 12+ years that I have worked at my company I have had extremely limited access to users. I’ve only made 3 branch visits over that time and what little access I have had, has been reserved for usability testing the applications I was working on. And, when branch visits are set up UX is usually the last person considered as a candidate to go. But when you are starting a project you need to know who you are designing for. What do you do? Covert user research! Believe it or not there are a lot of ways for you to find out about people without talking to them directly. Find User Representatives User representatives are people who are not the user, but may have been the user at some point in their career. Sometimes your business representatives can be user representatives if they did the job. I would give a word of caution here. While your business representative may have worked “in operations”, they are also heavily invested in the business goals of the company. So, you rea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mac vs. Windows: Should You Really Be Using a Mac for Design?

There's this thing about the design community, especially visual designers. They generally prefer to use a Mac for design work. I get it. The first time I saw my company's website on a Mac using Netscape, "Wow!"  I've always been a Windows girl, even for design work. I live in the Seattle area. What do you expect? But seriously, there's more to it than that. My first experience with Mac versus Windows was when I was working as an office administrator in a small business with an open office and no conference room environment. My boss, the owner of the business, met multiple times with a designer to create the logo for the company and I always overheard the meeting conversations. My boss kept telling the designer that when he sent over his mocks and she looked at them on her (Windows) computer, the colors were different than when the designer showed her his work (on his Mac). The designer was forced multiple times to look at her computer screen at the color bein...
Post a Comment
Read more