Opinion: 8 reasons why companies don’t hire junior UX designers & how to get hired
Unfortunately so many companies fall into this trap that they only want to hire senior designers instead of junior designers.
How to get hired
Unfortunately, so many companies fall into this trap that they only want to hire senior designers instead of junior designers.
Why do companies want senior UX designers
Even though there are many UX designer jobs when you look at job boards, but only a few, but only a few companies are prepared to hire junior designers, and here’s the reason why:
Reason #1
Hiring a junior UX designer is not time & cost-effective.
Hiring someone at a junior level can cause massive money for a company. The problem is not the salary. It is the cost and the time that someone else needs to dedicate to upskill the junior designer.
Junior designers usually require a lot of attention from a senior designer. Sometimes, especially when an organization is small, they cannot afford that. They might not even have a senior designer working. Therefore they prefer to have someone who can take a project and run with it. To be fair, usually, junior designers are not prepared to do this after they graduate from college or bootcamp.
Reason #2
The other reason why companies don’t want to hire junior designers is because of the quality of work junior designers might deliver.
This is a generalization only, so not all of the junior designers produce lower quality work, but on average, yes, they do.
A senior designer is much faster with design delivery. Seniors may already have assets from previous projects that they can utilize during a new project. In contrast, a junior designer needs to build everything from scratch.
Reason #3
Junior designers are not good at time management yet, because they haven’t worked with time constraints.
Delivering something on time is a skill that they need to learn on projects. A lot of companies assume that they won’t be able to deliver projects & design work by the deadline. So, it’s essential during the interview that you express that you have excellent time management skills.
Reason #4
The other reason why companies don’t want to hire junior designers is that employers cannot afford to assign a senior person or a supervisor to a junior designer. Junior designers usually learn much better when a senior designer is assigned to them, so working alongside another designer would be beneficial. Still, many companies cannot afford that.
Reason #5
Because of their experience, senior designers are much better at making decisions on the spot and without consulting other people or other designers. This is something that junior designers haven’t mastered yet because of a lack of experience. Juniors most likely need another person as a sounding board to bounce ideas off and make decisions.
Reason #6
Another reason why companies don’t want to hire junior designers is that, even if they have a senior designer, not all senior designers are great mentors. Assuming that just because somebody is in the field for a long time (e.g. over five years) they should be perfectly able to mentor another junior designer. Still, in reality, that’s not necessarily the case.
Someone can be amazing at their job and deliver high-quality output & design solutions, but they are not good at passing their knowledge on to someone else. This is a skill that senior designers need to learn. However, not all senior designers want to be mentors or design managers and work with junior designers, and that’s just how it is.
Reason #7
Some senior designers are not that great at giving critique to other people. Those people usually are freelancers, or they tend to work solo on projects. So overall, not everybody is prepared to teach other people about design. We all need to accept that just because someone is a senior designer, they might not want to teach you. The best way to figure it out is to have a candid conversation about this and have your expectations set.
Reason #8
The other reason why companies don’t want to hire junior designers because even you learn Design Thinking theory, you probably don’t have system thinking knowledge and expertise. Especially when you’re coming out of boot camp or you just finished school.
For example, think about journey mapping, service blueprint, experience mapping, empathy mapping…only two of them could be practiced without users and on ‘fake’ projects. But for the rest…you need to have real-life experience because you cannot make things up. A considerable part of it is doing the user interviews, synthesizing the data, and mapping out the findings. No school or bootcamp will teach you this.
How to get hired
Now, what’s your best chance to get hired as a junior designer (who either finished a short bootcamp or obtained a college degree).
Tip #1
Your best chance is to have a killer portfolio & resume that shows potential employers you could do this job even without any experience.
Tip #2
Applying for jobs at larger organizations e.g. companies that are prepared to teach a junior designer, companies that can provide a senior designer or a mentor you can work alongside.
Don’t be disheartened. Just keep applying, keep practising, show up and do your best during an interview, and you’re going to get a job soon enough.
This article is the written version of my YouTube video that you can watch here:
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