all right. I'm back. It's been a while. I'm sorry I've been away without any prior announcements or anything like that. A lot has happened in the last few months, maybe even a year. We have moved house. We are now in a new location. I started a company last year as well called Space Duck, and I will talk about that in just a second as well. As a matter of fact, Space Duck is the sponsor of this video. More about him a little bit later. The reason why I wanted to make this video, though, is that a few weeks ago, I attended a Meetup hosted by ADP List. The whole theme was that it was a panel of designers sat on some stage, and then they were taking questions from the crowd. One of the questions that came up was, How do I get into UX? One of the panelists grabbed a microphone, leaned into it, and she whispered, Don't. There was a bit of a joke and a lot of truth into what she

was uh saying. I guess when she continued to explain herself, her response was, I usually tell designers that design is a terrible career, and I usually encourage designers not to get in. This kind of confused me a lot because uh for me personally, design has been an incredible career. I understand that it's not for everyone, but for me, it has taught me skills that I love and are very useful in my life. Uh, it has given me opportunities to work for some amazing companies and brands, and now it has given me the opportunity to work on my own product. The other thing that came up was that um within the past while, like the last couple of years, basically since Co, we've had this massive job hires, essentially money was almost free, lots of lots of investors were investing into tech, there was this massive hiring spree, shortage of people, and which then encouraged a lot of people to get into the career of design for a while and tech in general, not just design. And after a while, uh, what happened was that

companies realized they over-hired, and they fired a whole bunch of people. And now we have this mess of an industry where there just aren't as many jobs as there were available previously. So I wanted to make this video to basically break all of these down for you and assess whether or not design is a good career for you. Starting off with the current job market, I had a very quick look into this from a few different websites, and at the moment, it kind of looks like from the outside in, at the very least, that it's not really looking good. As I mentioned before, there has been a lot of layoffs, not a lot of hires as well. There have been so many layoffs that there are now dedicated websites that track all of these layoffs from different companies, which I will share a few of those down below. So let's have a look at some of that data. All right, just to give you an idea, a recent article that I came across on Tech Crunch, and let's just go to the link over here, said that the tech

industry in 2024 alone has seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies. I believe this is mostly us as well. I don't know if this article goes across the world, and also we're only in August at the moment. I will link to this article down below. There are also two other interesting places that I recommend you guys looking into. So one is this guy, and the other is this guy layoff tracker. So you could also track individual companies and see how they're doing throughout the months. Now when you hear about all these layoffs, it might seem like that the market is shrinking, but if you take a step back, you'll see that it's more of a correction. Let me explain. I've collected a bunch of different files here. Let's start with this one. If we scroll down, we come across a net te employment trending. Now again, mind you that this is in the US only. If you take a look between 2018 to 2019, there was a bit of a

growth 2019 to 2020. This is where essentially Co happened, and all the layoffs happened. And then there was that massive surge in hiring. You could also see that between 2022 and 2023, that growth was slightly smaller, but between 2023 and 2024, it's definitely, definitely improving. If we look at other data, we can look at the trend is relatively similar across the industry. This is another article that I found. This is August 2023, so last year. You can see the massive hiring and then the correction over here. This article essentially talks about that. I'll link it down below so you could read it yourself. There's another similar one that they've done for Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the UK. Again, very, very similar story. So there was job postings were going down in 2018. Then there was a massive hire in 2022, and now there's a bit of a correction. I also quickly just wanted to compare us to other industries as well. We're going to look at the US.

and Au over here. So, if you look at the job postings on indie.com across the board, the trend was Co hits massive layoffs and a massive hiring and correction. If we look at specific sectors, however, over here, what I'm going to do, I'm going to remove this, and I'm going to swap it with software development. There was a massive Tech hire up here, a huge drop-off. It's sort of going up and down at the moment. It's stabilizing. It did hit the US a little bit harder. However, if you look at Australia, for example, you can see it tells a very similar story. A bit of a drop-off, massive hire, and now there's a correction in the market. Over here, Spaceo is the research and knowledge tool I wish I had as a designer. As designers, we constantly juggle research, hold numerous meetings, manage stakeholders, learn new skills, and more. This is where space comes in, a comprehensive ecosystem of research and thinking tools that bring everything together into one place. Capture anything you want for a very specific project or

any item that you want to come back to at a later time simply by using our browser extension. Every item that you capture is automatically titled, tagged, and embedded within the library, allowing you to search for it later in a way that aligns with the way that you think. Additionally, everything that you captured is treated according to its type. Save an image, and the colors are extracted. Save a PDF, and the content is searchable. Save an article, and you get a reader-friendly mode. Save a YouTube link, and you get the YouTube preview. You can also customize your environment based on your research needs. For example, when working on a project for a client, you can create categories to organize similar content and add custom properties based on your use case. So, for example, you can see how I have all of this custom data attached to this component. In the same way, you could do the same thing for your customers. This is a profile on Alina, but she is also attached to a customer interview that I've done with Alina, which has a relationship. I've added her as a

customer and this is the customer interview that I've done with all within one place, all searchable. You can then consolidate everything in spaces to create a focused project environment, set up workflows to track your work like this, and invite clients and contributors to collaborate with you on a project. Of course, this is just one use case, but there are many ways to use space stock to capture content, research, inspiration, learning materials, and more, and then later use it within your projects. Give it a try today, and thank you for supporting this channel. Channel when layoffs like this happen, they usually shake the entire industry. What I mean by that is jobs become less and less available, salaries get impacted because of that, so there are massive salary drops at the moment. There is no way you're going to get the same salary as you could a couple of years ago during the hype. With so many people that lose their jobs now are back in the job market, they're competing with all these other people, and the negotiation Powers also falls off as well, so you

kind of just have to take what's given to you, especially when you're newer into the market. You're now competing with all of these people trying to apply for very similar roles at you. Um, so experience becomes a bit of a roadblock for some people as well. And, uh, recently there's also been a massive pool of freelancers and contractors that are willing to take these jobs. And, uh, the difference between a full-timer and a contractor is that contractors are a lot less risky for the business. So, for example, if the contract is hired and then the business runs out of work, they could very easily end that contract, essentially let the freelancer go. The same thing cannot be said for a permanent employee. Because of this, companies can be much, much more picky about who they choose to work with as well. So, previously, if you maybe managed to measure yourself up to about 80-90% of the actual job criteria, right now you probably need to get a lot closer to that perfect candidate for that specific company as well. So, that's something to

keep in mind too also when it comes to investment. Investors are also a lot more cautious these days as well, especially with the higher interest rates in safer areas like, for example, the bank. Like, if you just leave your money at the bank today, you get a pretty solid interest return back. So then, it's a lot less risky to put your money there versus into very, very high-risk startups and businesses that usually have a 90% of a failure rate, specifically for startups, not established businesses. But also, established businesses find themselves in a world where money is just not freely available anymore. So, they have to really, really sort of prove themselves and The Business in order to unlock that next round of investment. With the added inflation globally at the moment as well within all this mix, it makes it much more difficult for just individuals, businesses, and families to spend money on digital products or online shopping, so on and so forth. So, people are just essentially just tightening up their budgets, which then as a side

effect immediately affects businesses too, which then affects the business's ability to actually go out there and hire other candidates. All right, now let's talk about the boot camp problem. Let's get something straight: tech jobs have always been very, very attractive to people because they are incredible work environments in general. It seems like from the outside in, you sit behind some computer, you do some coding and design, and you get paid a lot for it. And because of the barrier to entry to take compared to any other professional work, like accounting for example, or like architecture where you need a proper 4 to 7 degree, is much lower. From the outside in, it looks like that you could simply just do a couple of weeks to a few months of a boot camp, spend a few thousand, and you are golden, you're good to go. That is not true, however. I mean, this sort of a mentality and this sort of a route would have been kind of true when a lot of jobs were available, and some more junior designers that just come out of boot camps potentially grab

one of these jobs and learn while they're work as well. However, just doing a course like a boot camp is not going to make you work-ready anymore. It's not going to make you job-ready anymore. The barrier to entry is much higher. To become a good designer or good anything in general, you need to practice that skill set for around 10,000 hours. I'm not saying that everyone that starts out has that skill set, but you need to have a good amount of practice under your belt in order to sort of do your job as well as possible. There is no shortcut like a course that will just simply make you into a UI/UX designer. Sure, boot camps will show you some basics and will teach you some of the core elements that you might need. They would only get you about 10 to 20% job-ready. The rest of it is really up to you to put in the work and build essentially fake projects or trying to get like really cheap clients and doing some work at your own time and

just getting better at your craft. Also, when companies are making a junior hire, especially fresh Juniors, they are technically putting in a lot of investment into that person, especially initially, because they're putting all that time to train you. And hopefully, at some point, you will become very, very valuable for the company. And that is why junior roles are very rare nowadays. Probably as a junior, in order to successfully land a job, you need to stand out from all the other Juniors by potentially putting hours in a really, really good portfolio, being active on social media, going to meetups, trying to basically develop your skills, just so that you could stand out from the rest of the crowd. The other topic that I want to touch on is that you always need to ask yourself why you want to do what you want to do. So, why do you want to become a designer? And it's okay if money is a driver factor in that. Money is obviously important, but money should not be the only driver of that factor. In order to become a successful designer, you need to

love technology, problem-solving, building things, figuring things out, constantly learning new things, staying up to date with the new trends. Since I've started, so many things have changed. I mean, when I started, responsive design wasn't even a thing, and look at where we are now with all the AI and mobile apps and desktop apps. You watch UX and so many, so many, so many other disciplines. The landscape is just constantly changing when it comes to design. Also, knowing your why will help you design a better portfolio and a resume, and it will help you speak a little bit better about yourself and your experience when it comes to your next job interview as well. The next thing that I want to touch on is that design is actually a very tough career, regardless of how it looks like from outside in. In order for you to be a good designer, there are lots and lots and lots of things that you need to sort of learn and become really, really good at. Generally speaking, you need to be a jack of many trades and a master of a few of those traits to give you an

example, let's just look at the landscape today. You need to understand how to use Figma. That's just a current industry standard tool. But there is animation, color theory, understanding users, user interaction, a little bit of UX, a little bit of UI, understanding how coding works, technology, understanding how different devices that you're designing for work, just to name a few. There are many others as well. So, for example, if you work at a specific business sector, then you need to do your best to learn about that business as much as you can as well. So, if you're working in medical technology, you need to learn about that. If you're working in e-commerce, in a very specific particular area of e-commerce, you need to learn about that, so on and so forth. Another topic I wanted to touch on was the reality of the job, just understanding what the reality is. Again, from outside in, design looks like a really, really cool career, and I believe this, but it's much, much more than just doing some cool designs, adding some drop shadows, adding some colors, and calling

it a day doing actual design work is usually about 20 to 30% of the job, and I will cover this topic in a different video because it's a larger piece. But other than that 20 to 30% that you are actually designing, a lot of your time is spent in meetings, stakeholder management, talking to users, researching, bug fixing, quick fixing, trying to basically sell your design either to a client or to stakeholders, constantly arguing with developers on what isn't possible, and so forth. Those are just the realities of a design career, and understanding those realities will help you keep your expectations in check. I also wanted to speak about talent in general a little bit as well. When you look at social media, it looks like talent usually comes overnight, and some designers are just simply more talented than others. Although there is a little bit of truth in that where different designers are good at different areas depending on their interest, certain eye for design, so on and so forth, generally

speaking talent comes with lots and lots and lots of work practice, constantly just practicing your skill, constantly improving your skill whenever you have some free time, studying a new sort of topic about your career and about your craft, going on Dribbble, for example, grabbing designs and just seeing what works and what doesn't work, and trying to replicate those designs yourself just to learn a few skills here and there, understanding design systems, understanding the design industry, so on and so forth. In order to become a talented designer, you need to really help yourself out by practicing your craft, and over time, you just become better and better and better at it. I also wanted to talk about how different people would just have different experiences. So again, my experience compared to the lady that was from the panel are very different. If you ask me today whether or not you should get into design, I would say that yes, design is still an amazing career if you're truly passionate about product design, design product building, if you're truly passionate about technology, if you're

truly passionate about constantly learning things. It's a lot of work, but if you love it, then yes, you should absolutely, absolutely do it. But just be very that when you ask multiple people a question like that, you are going to get different answers, and at the end of the day, it's up to you to figure out whether or not this path is right for you. I also wanted to unpack a couple of things about having a healthy mindset here as well. At its core, as employees, what we need to do is to provide as much value that we can to the employer and therefore become valuable to that business and, in some cases, indispensable. The more value you offer, the more skill sets you have for that business, the more valuable you are at the end of the day. And I also just wanted to touch on portfolios. You need to have a good portfolio. I don't care what anybody else says, and I don't care how busy you are. You need to have a good portfolio in order to stand out in order to for

someone to actually hire you. Think of it as when somebody wants to build a house and they want to hire an architect. And if the architect doesn't have a good portfolio of work to showcase to the client, then the client is just going to go with somebody else that does. And the same thing will happen with you. So when you come across these posts on social media that say things like, Oh, designers are too busy and they shouldn't make portfolios, or Designers are too busy and they shouldn't learn new skills, or Designers cannot learn design and research, and so on and so forth, just fill in the blank. I'm sure you've come across these posts. The reality is that good designers actually keep their portfolios up to date, especially when they're looking for work. They learn new skills. They try to add on to the skills that they currently have. They try to master the one that they currently are really, really good at as well. It's just the reality of the job. If you don't do it, somebody else will, and that person

will end up taking the job instead of you. I also wanted to talk about AI as well. So, one thing that I constantly hear nowadays is that, Is AI going to take my job away? Although it's a little bit of a complicated question to answer, as AI stands today with the current technological abilities that we have and with the amount of compute power that we have, your jobs are going to be safe for the next few years. I don't know how long that future is, but I don't think if within the next 5 to 10 years AI is going to take design away completely. Is it going to change the landscape of how we do our work? Yes, it already has. We have things like MC Journey that generate imagery. We have things like chat GPT that can help you with ideation and copyrighting. We have other things for voiceover effects, and we are going to have some capabilities to create some simple videos, so on and so forth. Um, we have tools like uard or Wizard, and we have tools like Figma.

which are also trying to play within the AI sort of category. Again, I will make another video on this to unpack all of these. There's a lot that goes into AI, and we are using AI in the current tools. So, I have learned a thing or two about the capabilities and the limits of AI as I see it today. You're fine. I don't think if AI is capable of taking a designer's job away. It will, however, make that barrier to entry a little bit harder, especially for juniors, because what we used to get juniors to start out with can now, or if not now, maybe slowly be offset to an AI model to do some repetitive tasks, so on and so forth. That just means that the barrier to injury becomes a little bit higher, and therefore, juniors now need to learn more skills to become more useful for a brand-new business. Bear in mind that technology always advances, just like how WordPress didn't take any developer or web designer jobs away, or just like how when Webflow came out, everybody was

like, oh, front-end development is over. That's just not the case. Um, it hasn't been the case for many years. I believe AI is going to be the same thing. It is going to become a tool that you'll use in order to create certain workflows that will make your workflow either better or faster. All right, I just wanted to make this section as well where it's like, where to from here. These are my closing thoughts, I guess. I still think that design is an incredible career. I think anyone that is truly passionate about it should get into it 100%. I think the realization should be that six weeks of a boot camp is not going to turn you into a designer. It's going to take years to master a craft. That's just a reality. It's a challenging career. It's going to take a lot of hard work. But I think it's all worth it if you truly love it. So, I believe if you love it, stick to it, stick it out, and good things will come from that. If you constantly improve, learn something new every sing

single day, you will find work eventually, and once you do, just build up your skills from there and try to make yourself as indispensable as possible. I believe with the massive flood of people trying to get into Tech, some will continue to apply for these jobs, some will give up at some point, and some will stick to it. It's up to you to decide which one you want to be, but that's just a reality. But even if you don't decide to stick to it, I believe that those people will then can move on and figure out what they want to do with their life and with their careers and figure it out from there. But at the very least, they'll know that design isn't for them. And a closing statement is that in today's market, standing out is more important than ever, whether that is through your work, your portfolio, networking, or anything else that you think outside of the box in order to stand out is going to sort of help you advance your placement within the field. I believe that making yourself unique

and useful is key, and I believe that if you stick to it, and if you absolutely love it, you will find work. That's it. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next one.

Don't Become a UX/UI Designer

Don't Become a UX/UI Designer