The Journey of Being Self-taught - Part 2
Do you ever start a journey without knowing where you’re going? without knowing the real cost and when it’ll end? I certainly don’t, and if someone ever told me that my career would feel like this, I would have laughed. Everyone that knows me understands that I’m a planner because I go on a vacation trip with a year ahead of plans, reservations to attend and carefully chosen flights.
It turns out that my professional career was nothing like that, especially the part where I assumed that my learnings from the university would be the main tools for my future job, whatever it was going to be. Looking back where I started and where I am right now, it can’t be farther from the truth.
This article is part of a series where I explore my journey of learning Product Design on my own, you can check chapters one and three to read the full story.
Road of trials
During the beginning of my career, I was flying solo, and after several years of doing so, I decided to try something completely new: being part of a team. Working on my own taught me several soft skills that otherwise would have taken longer for me to develop, like doing estimations, time and client management, proposal creation and pricing my work. Those skills were good, but none of them involved anyone other than the client and myself, so I had no idea of how team dynamics were and where that would lead me.
I quickly discovered that working with a team was more challenging than I expected. As an introvert it’s natural to prefer working on your own, but also because I always preferred to pick my teammates by myself instead of being assigned to work with a group of strangers. During my time in the university, I had one main team that I worked with and our dynamic was natural, but now in an agency of software development, I was working with a different team every few months, many times in parallel, to reach a shared goal.
I didn’t have any type of training to be prepared for the new challenges I was about to face, but with the help of an encouraging mentor and many amazing teams, I managed to overcome this trial by fire. The resources I picked along the way when I was just starting remained with me, but the situations that taught me the most were changing, and so I had to evolve the way I learned too.
1. Team Collaboration
As mentioned before, I wasn’t a big fan of being part of a team of strangers, I dreaded the moment when a teacher did that for the sole purpose to teach us that “you have to learn how to work with other people rather than just your friends”, and I honestly thought it was a lie until I faced the truth.
Slowly but surely, I started to observe how my role could fit into a team, picking up on their language and specific needs, and so I started to adapt my way of working to blend in every time a new team was formed.
Hard skills related to my craft were easier to master, but the real challenge was developing the necessary soft skills to not only work in a team but also become a team player. As if it wasn’t challenging enough, by the time I’ve learned to work in harmony with a team, it was time to kick off a new project and start all over again.
Every team was different in many ways compared to the last one, or any previous one, but I learned something new with every team member that I encountered along the way. After all, the sum is better than the parts.
You can read more about the soft skills that I developed as a team player in another article I wrote recently: How Being a Musician Made me a Better Product Designer.
2. Watching Talks and Listening to Podcasts
It was only natural that after a LOT of reading, I switched to watching talks and listening to podcasts around the topics that interested me the most. Before that, I’ve found a few videos here and there that shared some tips and tricks, but it was only when I started digging into Design Systems that I learned about design conferences happening around the world, TED talks and podcasts that sparked my attention with just the right amount of storytelling and knowledge.
When a friend first recommended me to listen to Jake & Jonathan’s former Product Breakfast Club, I had the same reaction most have when they get their first podcast recommendations: “I’m not the podcast type of person”. Or so I thought. It was only about finding the right type of show for me, just like coffee or wine.
So I gave PBC a chance and loved everything about it. It was nothing like what I initially imagined a design podcast to be: opinionated, unstructured and with lots of rambling, but funny and insightful all the same.
Slowly but surely, I found various podcasts to learn and enjoy immensely at the same time, so here are some recommendations for you to try:
The most unexpected part about watching talks and listening to podcasts was being captivated by their public speaking skills and how it connected them to a broader community (more on that later). This type of impact motivated me into becoming a speaker myself, something I thought was buried in my university years and hadn’t really enjoyed before.
It was daunting and exciting at the same time, preparing myself for weeks and getting over the slight stage fright, but ultimately feeling accomplished after sharing something I was passionate about to a larger audience.
3. Taking Courses
When we’re in the university, we usually think that 5 years of studying is everything we need, and we couldn’t be more wrong. As we progress in our careers, we start deviating to specific areas that aren’t even close to what we studied in our initial years, and that’s why the university is merely our first step of many into what hopefully becomes a fulfilling career.
In my case, Graphic Design taught me the fundamentals of design, but it lacked most of the nuances that come with the Product Design field. That’s why I knew that taking courses in specific topics would help me to dig deeper and develop new skills.
After doing some benchmark research I came across the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF), an online school with self-paced courses at an affordable price. Its content has been crafted by industry experts and it’s suitable for all levels and roles.
The Course Certificates are a nice touch to prove that your learnings have been tested and validated, but to me, the real value comes from your newly acquired skills as a solid foundation, so you can put it into practice the next time that a new project or client requires it.
You may not need a brand new dashboard, gamification techniques, or Usability Testing in your current project, but you’ll certainly do at some point (it happened to me many times), so it’s better to be safe than sorry.
If you’re curious about their courses, here are some ideas to start learning:
