In response to a letter from a couple of weeks ago, someone asked:

How in the world is a junior designer meant to get a consultant position?

This is an excellent question. If you handed a consultative role to me in 2006, I would not have done a good job with it. Hell, I was barely competent as a designer back then. I know I’m not alone.

You don’t make junior designers into consultants. You make junior designers into senior designers. Then those become consultants.

But our industry has never been good at mentoring, and now we’re especially disastrous at it, since we’re not interested in hiring for junior-level roles anymore. So how is someone supposed to get out of college and become a junior designer, let alone consult?

The industry can do a few things, and nobody with power or resources is going to like any of them, but this is probably what’s required to ensure that design has anything approaching a reasonable pipeline going forward:

1. Normalize paid internships. People should be able to work on small projects during their summer breaks, and people should be able to work in part-time roles during their education. These exist, but nowhere near widespread enough to handle the full pipeline of an industry.
2. Hire from college. Shocker of the century, but if people at elite schools are wondering how they’re going to eat when they get out, then we have a problem.
3. Create a clear, defined, widespread path to seniority. Right now, the only way I know for someone to become “senior” is to work in the industry for a set number of years. What do they learn during that period? What outcomes do they create? Great question: nobody knows. This needs to change, and it starts by asking ourselves what a senior designer does and needs to learn. Experience alone isn’t enough.
4. Create widespread mentorship opportunities for design work in all types of organization, from giant tech companies to small agencies, regardless of whether they happen to work there. Review others’ work. Ask questions. Encourage better thinking.

I don’t think any of this is going to happen overnight, and I’m in a position to act on only a couple of them, but this is what I wish existed when I got into the industry. It still isn’t there. And I think most others would agree that it would be helpful. Certainly in the long run, it would create more consultants.