[IxDA Discuss] Career: Deep vs Broad Experience

[Will Parker]

On Mar 4, 2007, at 9:59 PM, Phil Chung wrote:
> A question for the more "experienced" folks on the list:
>
> In terms of career advancement and job security, is it better for  
> an interaction designer to develop deep or broad experience, in  
> terms of product domains?

The conventional wisdom up here in the Seattle area is that you  
should have a more-or-less "T-shaped" experience profile. Broad  
experience for the top crossbar, plus real depth in one subset of  
skills. Personally, I think this leaves out a whole host of potential  
letterform-based experience graphs, and we're only talking about two  
dimensions.

Nonetheless, the main trick is to show that you have the ability to  
solve the problems your potential employer needs to have solved.  
Broad experience in a business area (e.g., web, telecom, advertising,  
etc.) shows you know the general problem space for that line of work  
and that you can usefully communicate with anyone in that business.  
Deeply geekish obsession in a subset of areas is going to show that  
you're the only person insane enough to handle the problems specific  
to that area.

> For example, would you recommend spending twenty years working on  
> one type of product (e.g., websites) or twenty years spread across  
> mobile, games, web, software, voice, hardware, etc.?

Never spend twenty years doing the Same Damned Thing -- ever. Only  
trees do that, and the payscale for being a tree is lousy. I'm not  
talking about type of product / type of business -- I'm talking about  
focusing on one specialization around one set of skills.

Personally, I'm transitioning from a long career in software support,  
documentation and testing into IA/UxD/IxD, but before that I was  
pretty handy with a wrench and a soldering iron, and before that, my  
academic work was in clinical psych, computer science and film  
animation. From one perspective, it looks like a scattered mess --  
but from my perspective, it looks like different views of analyzing,  
explaining and solving design problems.

You need to learn enough about what's at the core of _your personal  
work_ to be able to articulate how your personal work history is  
related to your problem-solving abilities, and to the problems your  
potential employers are trying to solve. Once you  have a good grasp  
on that, you'll know which jobs are right for you, and which are just  
temporary.

- Will

Will Parker
wparker at ChannelingDesign.com

"The only people who value your specialist knowledge are the ones who  
already have it." - William Tozier