Insights
Your Employer Doesn't Care About Your Career
UX professionals need to stop expecting their employer to care about their career advancement as much as they do for themselves.
I have spent a lot of time reading lately. Much more than I had been before on subjects like the state of UX, product development, and AI. Specifically, I have been reading job posts after job posts where each one is asking for the proverbial unicorn. You know, the designer who has 15 years in an industry that many companies didn't acknowledge until less than 10 years ago. Those same people are asking the designer with over 10 years of experience to have a degree in a "UX related field" which didn't exist when they were going to school.
All this illustrates the point that there is a disconnect between what an organization knows about what it takes to be a great UX designer or researcher and what they assume it takes to make a direct impact on their company. Here is a fact: employers don't care about making you into a better designer or researcher. They do care about you getting better at your craft to help them produce, but there are limits. This seems like an obvious statement, but I've managed many UX professionals who became frustrated with the company's unwillingness to invest in their education or for not having a clear career ladder after reaching a senior or principal level.
The truth is that your career advancement and continuing education are ultimately up to you and you alone. You may be lucky enough to have a manager who truly cares about you and your career, but they are doing so because of who they are, not because of a company mandate.
THE LIE WE TELL OURSELVES ABOUT CAREER GROWTH
We are taught from a young age that to get ahead, we need to work hard, produce good work, and continually level up our skills, and we will climb the career ladder. Then we get out in the 'real world' and find out that people who speak up (and out), take the credit, and can talk about outcomes are the ones who really move up, even if their skillsets are not on par with others.
According to Nielsen Norman Group, 89% of teams lack documented career ladders for UX professionals, and only 18% have advancement pathways outside of manager roles. So, in other words, the ladder doesn't exist.
Here are a few more fun facts:
In 2019, 67.9% of designers found new jobs within three months. By 2024, the rate dropped to 49.5% and is continuing to decline at a rapid pace.
Less than 5% of current tech openings target junior/entry-level roles. Getting your foot in the door is nearly impossible right now.
Career progression in UX is described by practitioners as "difficult, stagnant, slow, or undefined."
THE ECONOMIC REALITY: Your Growth Costs Them Money
You are moving up the ladder, and continued education costs the company money. As with all things that cost the organization, it comes down to the ROI on that investment. Companies exist to maximize profit, so how does promoting you or sending you to another off-site training benefit them in the long run? Managers also have to consider that investing in your skill development on the company's dime also means you become more marketable and could leave for a higher-paying position or a promotion.
Here is what employers are calculating when it comes to your career advancement:
Hire experience rather than develop it (cheaper, short-term)
Keep employees "content enough" to stay without promoting them to higher salary bands.
Many companies don't invest in development at all, instead staying trapped in constant hiring cycles, searching for unicorn candidates.
When budgets tighten, design and product teams are among the first to be cut
So you may say, "it costs the company way more to hire and retrain a new employee than it does for them to promote me." You aren't wrong. In fact, employee development offers a 33:1 ROI, yet most companies won't touch it because they're terrified of training someone who leaves. Instead, they retain mediocre performers, which is obviously worse.
THE CAREER PLATEAU IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
A UX career progression follows five stages: Novice → Contributor → Practitioner → Specialist → Leader. Most practitioners describe career progression as "highly nonlinear and self-driven" and company-specific rather than following any universal path. Companies keep it vague on purpose. It's not that they don't know or haven't given it any thought.
Truth behind this type of thinking:
You get promoted when it serves the company's needs (backfill, retention crisis, merger)
You stagnate when promoting costs more than keeping you quietly frustrated.
In-house designers risk "design stagnation" by becoming too comfortable with one product and losing their innovative edge.
The "management" trap: Many organizations still equate growth with management roles, limiting those who want strategic IC work. Not everyone aspires to be a manager.
In the UX field alone, UX Research positions dropped below 1,000 postings in early 2025. Entire specializations are vanishing. AI tools are automating parts of the design process, making companies even less inclined to invest in developing human talent.
Quit expecting your employer to build your career
Enough with the doom and gloom. You may be wondering what you can do about it and how to take control of your own career. You need to make a living, you like the team you work with, but you are frustrated that for the last few years, you've felt stuck.
Here is what you should be doing yourself:
Document outcomes in dollars or time saved.
"Increased conversion 18%, added $2.3M revenue" is much better than "Led checkout redesign." Executives care about money, not your craft.Learn the tools replacing you.
AI isn't going away. Master it before your company decides they need fewer designers who don't.Speak business, not design.
Understand P&Ls and know what your executives actually worry about. The designer who connects UI decisions to customer acquisition cost gets the budget. The one talking about "awesome experiences" gets cut.Build real relationships, not a network.
Most jobs I've gotten has come from someone who knew my work, not from my resume. Work on side projects with people you respect and they'll call you when openings happen.Take the ugly projects.
Legacy systems and tech debt teach you constraint-based thinking and give you quantifiable wins. Also, fixing what everyone else shies away can help you stand out.Pay for your own growth.
Companies won't invest in you, so invest in yourself. Courses, conferences, books, use your money, build your skills, and nobody can take them back.Know when you're done.
Two years at the same level with no promotion in sight? You've gotten comfortable, so you're not advancing. The market rewards movement, not loyalty.
The System Won't Change, So You Have To
Companies will continue to not give a damn about your career because caring costs money. They'll continue to make vague promises of growth while maintaining systems that make advancement nearly impossible. The designers and researchers who thrive are the ones who stop waiting for permission, stop expecting their employer to play parent, and build their own ladders.
Forget about thinking any company owes you a career, and don't focus so much on specialty that you pigeon hole yourself. There is the other extreme which is becoming a such a generalist that you don't really offer anything unique.
Your career is your problem. Always has been. The sooner you accept that the "learning culture" in the job description was aspirational, the sooner you can focus on what actually moves the needle: skills, network, and leverage.
Now go figure out what you want out of your career, and build your own plan on how to get there.
More to Discover
Insights
Your Employer Doesn't Care About Your Career
UX professionals need to stop expecting their employer to care about their career advancement as much as they do for themselves.
I have spent a lot of time reading lately. Much more than I had been before on subjects like the state of UX, product development, and AI. Specifically, I have been reading job posts after job posts where each one is asking for the proverbial unicorn. You know, the designer who has 15 years in an industry that many companies didn't acknowledge until less than 10 years ago. Those same people are asking the designer with over 10 years of experience to have a degree in a "UX related field" which didn't exist when they were going to school.
All this illustrates the point that there is a disconnect between what an organization knows about what it takes to be a great UX designer or researcher and what they assume it takes to make a direct impact on their company. Here is a fact: employers don't care about making you into a better designer or researcher. They do care about you getting better at your craft to help them produce, but there are limits. This seems like an obvious statement, but I've managed many UX professionals who became frustrated with the company's unwillingness to invest in their education or for not having a clear career ladder after reaching a senior or principal level.
The truth is that your career advancement and continuing education are ultimately up to you and you alone. You may be lucky enough to have a manager who truly cares about you and your career, but they are doing so because of who they are, not because of a company mandate.
THE LIE WE TELL OURSELVES ABOUT CAREER GROWTH
We are taught from a young age that to get ahead, we need to work hard, produce good work, and continually level up our skills, and we will climb the career ladder. Then we get out in the 'real world' and find out that people who speak up (and out), take the credit, and can talk about outcomes are the ones who really move up, even if their skillsets are not on par with others.
According to Nielsen Norman Group, 89% of teams lack documented career ladders for UX professionals, and only 18% have advancement pathways outside of manager roles. So, in other words, the ladder doesn't exist.
Here are a few more fun facts:
In 2019, 67.9% of designers found new jobs within three months. By 2024, the rate dropped to 49.5% and is continuing to decline at a rapid pace.
Less than 5% of current tech openings target junior/entry-level roles. Getting your foot in the door is nearly impossible right now.
Career progression in UX is described by practitioners as "difficult, stagnant, slow, or undefined."
THE ECONOMIC REALITY: Your Growth Costs Them Money
You are moving up the ladder, and continued education costs the company money. As with all things that cost the organization, it comes down to the ROI on that investment. Companies exist to maximize profit, so how does promoting you or sending you to another off-site training benefit them in the long run? Managers also have to consider that investing in your skill development on the company's dime also means you become more marketable and could leave for a higher-paying position or a promotion.
Here is what employers are calculating when it comes to your career advancement:
Hire experience rather than develop it (cheaper, short-term)
Keep employees "content enough" to stay without promoting them to higher salary bands.
Many companies don't invest in development at all, instead staying trapped in constant hiring cycles, searching for unicorn candidates.
When budgets tighten, design and product teams are among the first to be cut
So you may say, "it costs the company way more to hire and retrain a new employee than it does for them to promote me." You aren't wrong. In fact, employee development offers a 33:1 ROI, yet most companies won't touch it because they're terrified of training someone who leaves. Instead, they retain mediocre performers, which is obviously worse.
THE CAREER PLATEAU IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
A UX career progression follows five stages: Novice → Contributor → Practitioner → Specialist → Leader. Most practitioners describe career progression as "highly nonlinear and self-driven" and company-specific rather than following any universal path. Companies keep it vague on purpose. It's not that they don't know or haven't given it any thought.
Truth behind this type of thinking:
You get promoted when it serves the company's needs (backfill, retention crisis, merger)
You stagnate when promoting costs more than keeping you quietly frustrated.
In-house designers risk "design stagnation" by becoming too comfortable with one product and losing their innovative edge.
The "management" trap: Many organizations still equate growth with management roles, limiting those who want strategic IC work. Not everyone aspires to be a manager.
In the UX field alone, UX Research positions dropped below 1,000 postings in early 2025. Entire specializations are vanishing. AI tools are automating parts of the design process, making companies even less inclined to invest in developing human talent.
Quit expecting your employer to build your career
Enough with the doom and gloom. You may be wondering what you can do about it and how to take control of your own career. You need to make a living, you like the team you work with, but you are frustrated that for the last few years, you've felt stuck.
Here is what you should be doing yourself:
Document outcomes in dollars or time saved.
"Increased conversion 18%, added $2.3M revenue" is much better than "Led checkout redesign." Executives care about money, not your craft.Learn the tools replacing you.
AI isn't going away. Master it before your company decides they need fewer designers who don't.Speak business, not design.
Understand P&Ls and know what your executives actually worry about. The designer who connects UI decisions to customer acquisition cost gets the budget. The one talking about "awesome experiences" gets cut.Build real relationships, not a network.
Most jobs I've gotten has come from someone who knew my work, not from my resume. Work on side projects with people you respect and they'll call you when openings happen.Take the ugly projects.
Legacy systems and tech debt teach you constraint-based thinking and give you quantifiable wins. Also, fixing what everyone else shies away can help you stand out.Pay for your own growth.
Companies won't invest in you, so invest in yourself. Courses, conferences, books, use your money, build your skills, and nobody can take them back.Know when you're done.
Two years at the same level with no promotion in sight? You've gotten comfortable, so you're not advancing. The market rewards movement, not loyalty.
The System Won't Change, So You Have To
Companies will continue to not give a damn about your career because caring costs money. They'll continue to make vague promises of growth while maintaining systems that make advancement nearly impossible. The designers and researchers who thrive are the ones who stop waiting for permission, stop expecting their employer to play parent, and build their own ladders.
Forget about thinking any company owes you a career, and don't focus so much on specialty that you pigeon hole yourself. There is the other extreme which is becoming a such a generalist that you don't really offer anything unique.
Your career is your problem. Always has been. The sooner you accept that the "learning culture" in the job description was aspirational, the sooner you can focus on what actually moves the needle: skills, network, and leverage.
Now go figure out what you want out of your career, and build your own plan on how to get there.
More to Discover
Insights
Your Employer Doesn't Care About Your Career
UX professionals need to stop expecting their employer to care about their career advancement as much as they do for themselves.
I have spent a lot of time reading lately. Much more than I had been before on subjects like the state of UX, product development, and AI. Specifically, I have been reading job posts after job posts where each one is asking for the proverbial unicorn. You know, the designer who has 15 years in an industry that many companies didn't acknowledge until less than 10 years ago. Those same people are asking the designer with over 10 years of experience to have a degree in a "UX related field" which didn't exist when they were going to school.
All this illustrates the point that there is a disconnect between what an organization knows about what it takes to be a great UX designer or researcher and what they assume it takes to make a direct impact on their company. Here is a fact: employers don't care about making you into a better designer or researcher. They do care about you getting better at your craft to help them produce, but there are limits. This seems like an obvious statement, but I've managed many UX professionals who became frustrated with the company's unwillingness to invest in their education or for not having a clear career ladder after reaching a senior or principal level.
The truth is that your career advancement and continuing education are ultimately up to you and you alone. You may be lucky enough to have a manager who truly cares about you and your career, but they are doing so because of who they are, not because of a company mandate.
THE LIE WE TELL OURSELVES ABOUT CAREER GROWTH
We are taught from a young age that to get ahead, we need to work hard, produce good work, and continually level up our skills, and we will climb the career ladder. Then we get out in the 'real world' and find out that people who speak up (and out), take the credit, and can talk about outcomes are the ones who really move up, even if their skillsets are not on par with others.
According to Nielsen Norman Group, 89% of teams lack documented career ladders for UX professionals, and only 18% have advancement pathways outside of manager roles. So, in other words, the ladder doesn't exist.
Here are a few more fun facts:
In 2019, 67.9% of designers found new jobs within three months. By 2024, the rate dropped to 49.5% and is continuing to decline at a rapid pace.
Less than 5% of current tech openings target junior/entry-level roles. Getting your foot in the door is nearly impossible right now.
Career progression in UX is described by practitioners as "difficult, stagnant, slow, or undefined."
THE ECONOMIC REALITY: Your Growth Costs Them Money
You are moving up the ladder, and continued education costs the company money. As with all things that cost the organization, it comes down to the ROI on that investment. Companies exist to maximize profit, so how does promoting you or sending you to another off-site training benefit them in the long run? Managers also have to consider that investing in your skill development on the company's dime also means you become more marketable and could leave for a higher-paying position or a promotion.
Here is what employers are calculating when it comes to your career advancement:
Hire experience rather than develop it (cheaper, short-term)
Keep employees "content enough" to stay without promoting them to higher salary bands.
Many companies don't invest in development at all, instead staying trapped in constant hiring cycles, searching for unicorn candidates.
When budgets tighten, design and product teams are among the first to be cut
So you may say, "it costs the company way more to hire and retrain a new employee than it does for them to promote me." You aren't wrong. In fact, employee development offers a 33:1 ROI, yet most companies won't touch it because they're terrified of training someone who leaves. Instead, they retain mediocre performers, which is obviously worse.
THE CAREER PLATEAU IS A FEATURE, NOT A BUG
A UX career progression follows five stages: Novice → Contributor → Practitioner → Specialist → Leader. Most practitioners describe career progression as "highly nonlinear and self-driven" and company-specific rather than following any universal path. Companies keep it vague on purpose. It's not that they don't know or haven't given it any thought.
Truth behind this type of thinking:
You get promoted when it serves the company's needs (backfill, retention crisis, merger)
You stagnate when promoting costs more than keeping you quietly frustrated.
In-house designers risk "design stagnation" by becoming too comfortable with one product and losing their innovative edge.
The "management" trap: Many organizations still equate growth with management roles, limiting those who want strategic IC work. Not everyone aspires to be a manager.
In the UX field alone, UX Research positions dropped below 1,000 postings in early 2025. Entire specializations are vanishing. AI tools are automating parts of the design process, making companies even less inclined to invest in developing human talent.
Quit expecting your employer to build your career
Enough with the doom and gloom. You may be wondering what you can do about it and how to take control of your own career. You need to make a living, you like the team you work with, but you are frustrated that for the last few years, you've felt stuck.
Here is what you should be doing yourself:
Document outcomes in dollars or time saved.
"Increased conversion 18%, added $2.3M revenue" is much better than "Led checkout redesign." Executives care about money, not your craft.Learn the tools replacing you.
AI isn't going away. Master it before your company decides they need fewer designers who don't.Speak business, not design.
Understand P&Ls and know what your executives actually worry about. The designer who connects UI decisions to customer acquisition cost gets the budget. The one talking about "awesome experiences" gets cut.Build real relationships, not a network.
Most jobs I've gotten has come from someone who knew my work, not from my resume. Work on side projects with people you respect and they'll call you when openings happen.Take the ugly projects.
Legacy systems and tech debt teach you constraint-based thinking and give you quantifiable wins. Also, fixing what everyone else shies away can help you stand out.Pay for your own growth.
Companies won't invest in you, so invest in yourself. Courses, conferences, books, use your money, build your skills, and nobody can take them back.Know when you're done.
Two years at the same level with no promotion in sight? You've gotten comfortable, so you're not advancing. The market rewards movement, not loyalty.
The System Won't Change, So You Have To
Companies will continue to not give a damn about your career because caring costs money. They'll continue to make vague promises of growth while maintaining systems that make advancement nearly impossible. The designers and researchers who thrive are the ones who stop waiting for permission, stop expecting their employer to play parent, and build their own ladders.
Forget about thinking any company owes you a career, and don't focus so much on specialty that you pigeon hole yourself. There is the other extreme which is becoming a such a generalist that you don't really offer anything unique.
Your career is your problem. Always has been. The sooner you accept that the "learning culture" in the job description was aspirational, the sooner you can focus on what actually moves the needle: skills, network, and leverage.
Now go figure out what you want out of your career, and build your own plan on how to get there.