How can my manager ensure growth for a junior designer?
We converted a product designer intern into full time for sake of budget and I don’t think they’re getting the right treatment/environment to grow even though it’s been a year. This whole year they’re getting really basic projects, UI tasks, or cover for wherever my team (mostly senior) don’t have bandwidth. Because of this, they feel lost because they’re not forming any strong connections with eng or a PM and they’re not leading a product like the rest of our designers. My manager didn’t form any clear expectations of growth and leveling but that’s for all of us, honestly. The least I can do is help this junior designer grow but not sure how to go about this since I have huge memory fog from my new grad days. #productdesign #uxdesigner #ui/ux #newgrad
Are you looking to go into management any time soon? Offer to mentor the new grad – next time you're assigned a new project or feature, offer to tag team it and set up daily check-ins to give feedback on the work. You'll be the person responsible for the success, but you can outsource some of your work to give them ownership of it, but also make sure there's a process for accountability. Then if it works out, you have valuable mentorship experience to transition into management down the line.
Not at all. It just sucks to see that they haven't gotten better at visual or interaction design but I see them doing synthesizing for research with our UXRs to exercise that skill set. Thanks for the tip. For the ownership part, I'm not sure why a part of me wants to keep ownership for all my projects that I work on. A part of me feels like I can't trust them because their design skills have been mediocre and I fear I'd need to help them on so it's just easier if I do it myself. Again, I never really had a new grad junior on my design team before so all of this is new to me, lol.
Thank you for wanting to help them and not watch them drown. 💫
Best way is to work with you or another designer to mentor. Work on the same product together. I did this with the intention of my junior eventually taking over my project as I moved onto bigger stuff. It worked well for me. Also it’s a great opportunity for you to grow professionally and help someone. Surprisingly in my recent interviews this came up pretty frequently. Every team really grows with juniors, and not everyone wants to or is good at supporting them. And so people who are good at it sometimes have an edge.
Thanks for the tip! It's hard for me to mentor them when they don't have any questions for me when we meet so this is new to me.