Over the last few weeks I've been interviewing quite a bit, but after a slow week or two around the holiday I decided to take another look at my resumé and potentially redesign the whole thing into a timeline. The reason for this was because of comments I got from recruiters giving it a 2 second glance and thinking that I'm either still at my last job, or haven't been working for a year. While people quickly realize that I've been in school for the past year, I decided to take an attempt at turning it into a timeline instead. Here's how it came out looking:
While I ultimately won't use this as a resumé as I feel its not scannable: it looks like just too much text (even though its roughly the same amount as my current one). Additionally, in order to accommodate this style I had to repeat my freelance business multiple times, which takes up a bunch of space and makes it look like it was all full time work when the truth is that I've ramped my freelance work up and down over the years. But I wanted to show the evolution of my freelance work over time, developing new skills that often preempted similar full time roles: moving from branding, graphic design, and website design work, into more information architecture and UX work. However, when it comes to developing the skills and career to be a full stack UX/UI Designer, nothing is ever that clean or nicely bucketed into neat little boxes.
Developing a Freelance Career
When I thought about this evolution of my work I realized I had done some modeling around choosing freelance clients (and how to bill them) for a school project last year. Here's the final example and some process work:
These models also reminded me of my previous skill graph that I used to have on my website and (briefly) on my resume. While I think this style is still pretty popular, especially among the younger crowd, they are pretty vague in their meaning. Once I read Mike Montiero's tweet about these skill graphs, along with other similar sentiments from other design leaders, I decided to axe mine. Side note, if you're not following Mike Montiero on Twitter, you need to get on that. This book he wrote is also pretty fantastic.
Becoming a T-Shaped Designer
While I agree the skill graphs are a bit random, they are also somewhat similar to T-shaped designer graphs. There isn't a standard design for these graphs, there are plenty of similarities; much like design diamond graphs, once you've seen one you've seen them all. That said, if you're super interested in T-shaped designers, here's a good article on the definition and importance from InVision. Here's another more detailed article on the meaning of the graphs and hiring said designers. So for kicks, I decided to create my own post-grad school T-shaped UX designer graph.
Years Spent Developing Key Skills
Lastly, I decided to make another graph that shows my exposure to different UX, design, and business skills over time. My inspiration came from this design process graph from the Stanford d.school. While I love making these kinds of models, I haven't had much opportunity to in my recent freelance work over the past few weeks, so I decided to have some fun with these for blog purposes. Enjoy!