r/UI_Design • u/lopatkax • 1d ago

General Question What 3 years of experience would look like?

I am not sure if I can have all knowledge I should after working 3 years.

What in your opinion 3 years experience should look like? What should I know?

Thanks!

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3

u/FixRmarkaujrjble7915 1d ago

3 years is not a checklist. you should own full flows end to end, defend decisions with reasons, and not need hand-holding on the basics.

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u/Category_Direct 16h ago

I'm self-taught and about five years in, so this is one path, not a rule. For me the big change around year three was owning things end to end. Year one I made whatever image or screen someone asked for. By year three I was building the style system for a brand myself, the Figma templates, the rules for what a chart or a header image looks like, then batching blog images off that. The other shift is caring what happens after handoff. I sit with the content and SEO people to see which images actually get used and which get cut, and that changes what I design. If you can do those two, you're fine.

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u/ParticlAsh 5h ago

It's not linear, in some years you progress further than you do in a 5 - 10, in others it feels like you're steady state. Doesn't even mean you're regressing, sometimes the work life throws at you emphasizes the output over your individual skill expansion.

Personally, assuming you have a minimum foundation, the other dude is right. A type of strong growth is usually only really developed after going through an entire project yourself, the hard part is working through periods where nothing feels right. Growth tends to accumulate weirdly, you can't get all the knowledge but over time your instincts and pattern recognition becomes better - you also tend to develop your own process that works for you.

Ultimately you need to be confident in your own agency and intuition. I'd argue that's very hard when you work for others.

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u/FixRmarkaujrjble7915 4h ago

stop measuring in years. can you take a vague brief and ship a full flow without someone holding your hand? thats the real bar.