Career ladder from junior to director — guidance for UX professionals

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• Consistency: How is the employee delivering impact over time? Is the employee able to deliver their work (i.e features, projects, process improvements, etc) not just once or twice, but consistently? Velocity: What is the rate at which the employee is delivering impact? Is the employee able to deliver their work on time consistently? Value: What is the value of the impact that the employee is producing? What is the value in relation to the levels in our career progression framework? More senior levels are expected to deliver more value in their work.

• lower levels have a smaller area of focus and are more about demonstrating domain expertise, and higher levels have a larger area of focus and are more about demonstrating impact.

• ICs are expected to demonstrate impact through the breadth and depth of their domain expertise, while managers are expected to demonstrate impact through leveraging their influence on different domain experts.

• able to solve tightly scoped tasks

• learning how to be a productive, self-reliant UX professional with little supervision from others

• Typically, an L1 employee is expected to progress out of the L1 within a year or two.

• Level 1: (e.g. Junior Designer, Junior Researcher, Associate Writer)

• Level 2: (e.g. Mid-Level Designer, Researcher, Writer, etc)

• good understanding of the fundamentals of user experience

• autonomously execute defined projects within their team’s areas of responsibility.

• hey can independently define the right solutions to solve problems and execute from discovery to delivery

• they are beginning to expand their impact to others in the team through co-creation and feedback

• collaborate with others in their functional areas such as PMs, engineers, designers, data scientists, researchers, managers, and others to get the work done

• L2 is expected to progress to the next level within a couple of years.

• Level 3: (e.g. Senior Designer, Senior Researcher, Senior Writer)

• first inflection point where leadership is a defining requirement

• lead projects within their team’s area of responsibility.

• define milestones for and deliver well-scoped projects.

• functional skills in common user experience concepts

• knows when to seek advice from other specialties to create the best outcome