At our production meeting this morning, I mentioned that the organizers of this panel had asked us to “map out” or “visualize” our careers, to which the response on Zoom from one of our designers was an explosion of this emoji:

Unfortunately, however, because Zoom is video, everything is flipped horizontally, so instead what came out was this:

He swears it was unintentional. It’s good to have the support of your coworkers.

I was trying to think about how to map out my career in a way that would be useful for this panel, because I don’t feel like my path is particularly relatable for this audience. I started coding when I was eight or nine and even sold a piece of software a few years later. I’ve been interested in the design of things as long as I can remember and did our school’s logo when I was twelve. “Start when you’re eight” isn’t a helpful message for people about to graduate, nor is it an inevitable or sensible route to success.

In addition, a lot of the energy and effort in my earlier years went into finding ways to reconcile my interests in design and code. Thankfully, that’s a far more common path nowadays, and it’s even a baseline assumption for the program here in this department at Northeastern.

So instead of taking you through my own twists and turns, I’d like to focus on mapping out your careers, and some of the questions that should be driving the decisions that you make.

Who do you want to work with?

This one is so important to me, I started my own firm.

Who, Part 1: solo or team?

The norm is really group work: nearly every job you take will be you working on a team with several others, and be defined by how you interact with that team.

Some people have their own, extremely specific vision, and will pursue that with a certain level of madness, and while they may play well with others, they’re just as happy on their own.

For me personally, I get a lot of energy from being around people who are talented and smart. When someone on my crew makes something beautiful or useful—whether for us or just their own personal project, that’s so exciting. I get such a charge out of seeing that exist, and seeing them proud of making it appear.

So I started Fathom in part because I wanted to work at a larger scale, but also to have people around who would inspire the work and push it in other directions than I might do solo, making it much better in the process.

Who, Part 2: who can you learn from?

There are people you work for, who are likely mentors, and people you want to work with, who are your peers, but aside from that obvious distinction, who are you learning from?

Especially at this point in your career, you want to be around people from whom you can soak up as much experience as possible.

It’s not about a requirement of senior staff to teach you things, but instead, this is about being there and actively absorbing as much as you can. And that’s not just the more senior people, it’s your peers as well.

And conversely, what can you teach them? What are you contributing to this environment?

Storytelling or Tools?

Very broadly, a lot of the work in this space falls into the category of storytelling or tool building.

To make it sound important, we can call it exploratory versus expository. The exploratory is finding stories, the expository is making pictures of them. For instance, inside data journalism or marketing or communications.

The question is about whether you’re happy digging into data problems, and helping others do the same, or are you more interested in explaining to people what you’ve found?

I have always seen this work as more of a spectrum: that tools should be telling stories, and any story should have a way for users to ask their own questions and find side paths, the way you can with a tool. But it’s helpful to think about the distinction, and where you personally want to find that balance.

Who are you doing it for?

There’s an adage that goes “artists make their own problems, designers solve other people’s problems.”

If you want to pursue your own questions, you’re talking about roles that are more on the lines of an artist or a researcher or a scientist.

If it’s for others, that kind of a role is a designer or an engineer. And you won’t be surprised to hear that the pay varies.

But in case it’s not clear at this point, none of these questions have right and wrong answers. All these roles are really cool. But you need to figure out, and be honest with yourself, about where you want to live.

Do you need to make things? Or are you happy thinking about them?

I think about this a lot with my friends who are musicians. Almost nobody is a musician because they’re ever going to get rich off of it, but they cannot not play music. They just need to have an instrument in their hand, maybe several hours a day.

A lot of writers are in a similar boat. My wife is a writer and there are these fully developed characters and stories that are in her head, and they need to be let out.

So do you feel that way about design, or code, or writing, or what? Do you need to build that thing in your head?

On the other hand, a lot of people are just as happy with talking about the work. Meeting with users, gathering feedback, diagramming and mapping what people do, researching why they do one thing or another.

And if that’s you, you should be doing research. This might be design research, or working in academia, but it’s a very different animal from doing a frontline data journalism post where you need to turn something around quickly.

It doesn’t mean there isn’t research if you’re into building, but a really important distinction is whether you personally need to build the thing.

I enjoy thinking about problems for sure, but if I don’t actually make anything, I literally start getting depressed.

What can you do?

I need a better way to phrase this that doesn’t just encourage self doubt. But the question is about whether you’ve put in the practice. Like any other activity, you just have to put in those hours.

Have you done those hours for the skills that will be needed?

And in particular, have you put in the hours for the thing that you want to be doing?

If you haven’t, think about how you might level up. Is there an additional portfolio piece you need to build?

This is an opportunity to pursue something you’re curious about, and the sort of thing that I’d take note of as an employer. It’s great to see portfolio work that comes from someone trying to extend their skills or is simply curious about trying something different.

What’s the one thing you can do?

Focusing on this further, what is the one thing you can do? We like to hire people who are multidisciplinary. But for anyone under consideration, there’s a sense of, “if all else fails, what can this person do?” Make sure you have enough depth in at least one thing that can get you in the door.

This is especially important when you’re in a more junior role: there’s a lot of work where you just need to make it happen, you just need to execute.

Having a range of skills is really important, but think about that instead as a major investment for your future. Whereas putting in the time and practice to be really good at a skill that an employer can pay you for will open the door for you to do that broader work. When I was young, for instance, I could do typography and layout and operate Pagemaker and Photoshop, and that helped open a lot of doors.

What size fits?

This one may be a little more obvious, and most of the tropes about large vs small companies are true, but I do think about it a lot.

On some level, clearly I enjoy a smaller size company since that’s what I’ve been doing for over 15 years. At a small firm you can have a huge amount of responsibility, and with that you’ll learn a lot of things, though a lot of that is kind of firehose-style osmosis. That can be very stimulating, and you have more control over the work going out and the ability to keep quality high.

On the downside, that can be exhausting for some people. Some folks want to lay low and kinda 9–5 their way through things. For those people, being at a small firm feels like being on blast all the time, because everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing. The other downside is that you don’t have as wide a range of mentors. We had a woman in a senior role who left a year or two ago, and one of the most difficult things for her departure was that it left a hole because we have a lot of younger women in the office who wanted that input.

At a larger company, there’s also a better chance that your family, friends, etc have heard of the firm. If your parents can say, “oh, she’s at Apple” or whatever, their neighbors will likely nod approvingly because that sounds like success.

But those neighbors are picturing you being responsible for the next version of the iPhone, when in fact you’re spending your time in meetings arguing about dozens of variations to the sharing panel of the Voice Recordings app.

However, while it’s easy to get stuck on a more boring track at a larger company, you’ll also have a more structured environment for mentorship, and hopefully a broader range of people to learn from.

For me, while I enjoyed my coworkers at larger firms, and wouldn’t trade the experience for anything, spending a lot of time with too many people in too many meetings about minor details is one of my personal circles of hell.

What are you learning?

This is one of the things that keeps me up at night. If I’m not learning, I need to move on.

What is the unique combination of skills and interests you have, and how can you make use of them?

What makes you unique is another kind of a trope, but I think one of the toughest things is to figure out for yourself how you take all those layers of interests and skills and tie them together in a way that it can become a career.

If nearly half the hours in your week are spent at a job, you should maximize the amount of you as a person that you can bring to it. For me, I love to work, and work very long hours as a result, but if I’m doing that, it’s especially important that I’m spending time on things that are interesting and challenging, and doing it with people I care about.

So in closing, what are things that only you can bring to your work? And who are the people you want to have around you while you do it?