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The life of classical design studios starts in much the same way: several designers do approximately the same projects, which means that their specialization is approximately the same. Everything is simple here - one begins to learn from the other, they exchange experience and knowledge, work together on various projects and are in the same information field.
Difficulties begin at the moment when new business units appear, the studio model changes to the model of an agency or a product team. The number of specialists is growing, and their skills are mixed up so much that it becomes almost impossible to keep track of them. We faced this problem when, in addition to traditional web design, we had service design and branding teams, and the formation of a foreign UX team began. The question arose of how to digitize their knowledge, bring it to a single system and make an individual plan for improving skills for each.
I used to work as a designer, creative and art director, but now as a design director my job is to assemble creative teams within the agency and on the client side, pump them up and take them to a new level of efficiency. In this article, I will share our experience and talk about successful ways to develop both individual employees and the team as a whole.
Today, CreativePeople's Moscow office alone employs 65 people. Another 11 are from the Prague team, and about 30 are working on projects. An essential part of our team are designers, and it is easy to imagine how difficult it is to keep track of each of them, develop and organize in time.
At the heart of the designer's leveling system is the digitization of his current skills. To get an objective picture, we interviewed our designers about how they really perceive their positions and how they see further development, as well as spoke with the heads of departments of our clients' product teams. Opinions were divided: designers indicated hard-skills as basic skills for career growth, and department heads noted that they increasingly need soft-skills to make a person more useful. The problem is that in the market paradigm, most often the design lead / art director is usually the designer with the best skills and the best command of the software. At the same time, many people forget about soft skills, although business needs them first of all. And drawing skills are far from the most important.
And in our opinion, and in the opinion of those agencies with which we work abroad, junior is the person who just needs to be taught. Middle is the one who has learned, I can leave the task to him in the morning, come back in the evening, pick it up and send it to the client without checking for him. And Senior is the one who can teach others and implement the project with the help of different specialists.
We have always strived for designers to grow within the company, so we have developed our own employee competency assessment system. We call it DEMP: design, education, money, process are the main blocks of competencies that can be developed by a designer.
In design, we pump logic and visuals. In education, the main thing is the question of how he learns himself and can teach others. Money is about the perception of finance in the project, the team and your own. Processes show how well the designer knows about the creation of a creative product and the possibilities for its optimization.
Each block is divided into three levels. The first, basic, is the personal experience of the designer and the personal area of responsibility. At the next level, he already begins to think in terms of the category of projects. And at the last level comes an understanding of how the department/company works. In relation to design, it looks like this: I draw myself, I draw in collaboration, I draw with the help of other people (gathering a team and broadcasting my vision of the project to them).
One stage is divided into 3 sub-stages and the fastest time for which the designer went through the sub-stage is approximately 3-4 months.
But, of course, it does not happen that each block of a specialist will be filled to the maximum. And here the question arises. A person whose design is at the first level, but everything else is not, is this a good art director or a bad one?
According to this matrix, we got that there are a lot of guys whose visual skills are not so highly developed, but there are many other things that can be very useful in a team. What's more, if you look at the bottom two graphs, two people together form a very cool collaboration in terms of skills. Good knowledge of the processes, understanding at the project level of how work goes with money, learning ability, team building skills, training, coupled with a very strong design person, gives a very cool bunch. And thanks to digitization, we were able to select a person who complements the team with his strengths.
And then the employee development plan comes into play. He looks like this.
Stage 1. New employee
A consequence of the rapid changes in our field is how often a specialist is mistaken in his own assessment at the interview stage. It is not uncommon when a person comes to us for an interview, evaluating himself at the level of senior or at least middle. But in the course of communication, we understand that he cannot be perceived otherwise than as a junior, because he does not have half of the necessary skills. And this is not an overestimation of one's own strengths, but simply the result of the dynamics of design development. So not only beginners are mistaken, who were convinced in the courses that they now cost from 100 thousand, but also people with great experience. If five years ago they could apply for the position of art director in a small company, now they will be completely ineffective in the product team.
At this stage, we need to “get to the bottom” of a specialist: to understand his real level and correlate this with whether we can effectively pump him. To do this, we form a map of his skills.
See how the skill set is arranged in a similar way in the Figma team. Not only the grade differs, but also the number of skills that you need to know. An ideally pumped one skill is clearly not enough for career growth. They do not divide into such large blocks as we do, but they work in the same logic.
Stage 2. Synchronization with the team
As a rule, we have only three months to immerse a person in work, synchronize with our processes and transfer the accumulated knowledge. Sometimes this stage also includes the operational pumping of hard-skills, when you need to improve your knowledge of certain software.
At this stage, it is very important not only to transfer all the artifacts and throw off useful articles, but also to immerse the designer in the processes, to establish comfortable teamwork. And after three months, we can begin to study the strengths of the employee in a normal working environment.
Stage 3. Identifying strengths
We conditionally divide all designers into “three circles of trust”. In the first circle - everyone who works constantly, in the second - those who work with us on a project basis and produce a predictable result, and in the third circle - people with whom we have worked at least once and checked the level. The infrastructure of CreativePeople is designed in such a way that designers flow from one circle to another and it is easiest to get a permanent job, just getting into the “third circle”, having initially tried to do at least one project with us. This is much faster and more efficient than spontaneously looking for a new person in the market. People from the second and third circle are synchronized in the background - this helps to save time when moving to the first circle.
Stage 4. Natural pumping
If there were no particular problems with synchronization, then the natural growth stage was associated with difficulties. Designers have not always understood how a specialist grows and how a career can develop.
And this is normal, because 5 years ago there were some rules on the market, now they are different, and in 5 years they will most likely change too. The big question is what to do now and how to swing in order to be as efficient as possible over a long distance.
Stage 5. Development program
Of course, there is nothing better for leveling a designer than a bunch of master and apprentice. In management, this is called Shadowing - a method when someone “follows the shadow” of a more experienced specialist, and learns by repeating after him. In addition, there is mentoring, there is coaching, mentoring, and all these things differ from each other in the level of responsibility: for example, a mentor is responsible for the one he teaches, and the mentor simply transfers knowledge. Inside the agency, we use all of these options, depending on how and what skills of designers we want to develop. But there are many other options for how to upgrade a team, the main thing is to track the performance of each person in time and work with them.
In our skill set, we note the assessment that the designer has set for himself, and the assessment of another person (manager or colleague).
As a result, the system allows you to bring pumping to such a level that you will practically cease to be dependent on the external labor market. Over the past 6-7 years, all CreativePeople art directors have been grown inside.
To sum up
The most important thing, when a designer joins your team, is to agree right away on the shore that you will have some stage of synchronization. During this time, you will understand how you will work in terms of rules and terms.
Next, you begin to identify strengths using the competency matrix. Life hack: it is better to pump a person in the direction where he is already good. That is, if he is successful in the “Education” block, then it is better to further strengthen this competence and grow a good speaker out of him. And after he reached the maximum level here, develop the next block.
But this will already be a stage of natural growth, where the employee will, together with the team, absorb new knowledge and become stronger.
You can watch the video version of the speech .
Source: habr.com