Allison wrote: "In really large companies, at some point you sort of make a decision to either go the specialist route or the generalist route. Does this phenomenon exist in the IxD career path? If so, what are the generalist options?"
Here's my experience. I'll get to the specialist vs generalist question after some background. Sorry if this goes on a bit... I work in a really large IT organization in a really large company, and a few years back sort of made the decision to go the management route. As with many other organizations, there isn't much of a vocation-specific career path in ours per se -- that is, even for developers and engineers, after a few levels the next moves are into management of one kind or another. In my own case, I was leading a small group of UI designers and project managers associated with one of the company web sites, and that role grew into managing a much larger set of teams that included developers and testers as well, for several applications. Half the group -- including some of the UI folks -- were in Hyderabad, the rest in different US locations. I did this for a few years and enjoyed some aspects, didn't enjoy others, certainly learned a ton about what it means to manage transactional applications and deal with issues like system performance, infrastructure, databases, budget, disaster recovery, outage bridges, and the rest of it -- hanging on by the skin of my teeth in many cases, since really you need an engineering background (or aptitude) to excel in such things, and my own educational background is "only" in the humanities, film and video. After several years I felt a strong desire to focus on the areas where I had some native ability, namely in usability and user experience. I talked to a number of people around the company, even in non-IT areas, looking for ways to do this. Luckily, early this year an opportunity came along to lead a small (9 people) team focusing exclusively on the usability of applications used in our retail call centers. Getting back to the generalist vs specialist theme, even in this new usability-focused role I still have to do a wide variety of things. These include: - working on cross-functional research teams (e.g. looking at ways to improve average handling time without jeopardizing customer service and sales) - doing a lot of nitty-gritty design work (e.g. anything from changing a few words in an existing dialog box to coming up with entirely new applications including new standards, color schemes, interaction patterns, etc.) - doing a lot of "representing" and presenting to various client and executive teams, laying out how usability can matter for them, e.g. in the form of roadmaps, strategies, ideas of specific projects, etc. - acting as a change agent within IT (and our client teams) for inculcating usability as a discipline and a goal, in an area that traditionally is more operations-focused - doing industry analysis, e.g. looking at JD Power and similar reports and figuring out how they apply to things that IT can affect - interacting with requirements, architecture, development, and client teams in specific projects - spending tons of time out in the call centers (this is one of the best parts!) sitting with real users, listening to calls, observing both what gets in their way and what they are skilled at, and taking their ideas - working with the people on my team on their own projects, helping in whatever way I can, and trying to pay attention to their own career development - studying the flood of materials that come my way to try to understand aspects of our business and our systems and look for ways to improve their usability (e.g., recently I've spent a lot of time looking at the complex mechanics and processes by which special offers are generated and become part of the transactional flow, all the way from customer contact to back end billing systems) ... and so on. Although I guess all of the above add up to "generalist", in some ways I feel more like a hydra-headed specialist. Each of these roles requires some specialization. Since our organization has an ethic of managers/executives "getting into the details" rather than floating above them, I do feel like I have to act more like a specialist than a generalist, a lot of the time. Luckily my team is very talented and does most of the real specialist work, but I still have to dip in when and where I can. So "generalist vs specialist" doesn't quite feel like it explains everything in terms of career path. At least for a management role, the two are (can be) more like poles that you oscillate between, rather than one or the other. Al . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=35603 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
