Nomenclature of I.D. titles and levels

I recently went through establishing good, clear job descriptions with HR for entry, mid, and sr. ID positions. Somehow, there weren’t distinctive levels and descriptions and we had to create to make an offer for newhire. I settled on: associate industrial designer (newhire); industrial designer (2-5 yrs); and Sr. ID (7+ yrs) in that progressive order.

What do your companies call them? I see these titles and positions called many different things such as “ID I”, “ID II”, “jr.”, “staff”, “Chief”, etc. and curious what other place call them and how they might vary.

Also, we currently don’t have higher than Sr. I.D. and was told there are no plans to create one at this time (unfortunate since Sr. ID is what I’ve been for many years).

We got ID, Sr. ID, ID Lead, Principle ID, Distinguished ID.

Personally I find it a bit strange to assign titles based on years of experience.
I have worked with designers that developed in 2 years what took others 5.

But I guess there needs to be some kind of bench mark from an HR perspective :wink:

Technical track
Associate
1
2
Senior
Principle
Senior Principle

Management track
Manager
Senior manager
Director
Veep

I would not focus on number of years as that can be a trap. instead focus on roles, responsibilities and expectations (job description) keeping in mind that you can have 2 people with the same role but your expectations for how they execute them may be different. I know people with 10 years experience who cant perform the tasks that i would expect from a Sr. Designer, and in reverse i know designers who with 3 years experience can out perform people with 10 years “experience”.

You also want to look at the value creation that the individual brings to the company vs how long they have been in their field.

It carries a lot (as shown)

I used to hate all those levels so when I set it up at Sound United I just did it as:
Designer
Sr Designer
Associate Director
Director

At Nike it went
Designer I
Designer II
Sr Designer
Design Manager
Design Director
Creative Director

They might have changed it, that was 10 years ago.

At frog it was similar but they also had a principle designer track above senior for those that did not want to go into management but were valuable enough to get out of the pay bracket.