While only having been in the professional ID environment for four years, I’m starting to feel the need to look towards other careers that may or may not be related. Still love designing, but as of right now, it’s not allowing me to go where I want in life. Kinda at a dead-end of sorts.
Wondering what your suggestions might be. I’m looking into getting more into the marketing and product management side of my company so that I can learn and maybe move on to larger things. Although I have yet to earn any experience in general business practices, the financial part of companies does fascinate me and I would like to be in a more decision-making oriented position. Product management and development is also very intriguing as I would be able to sell the product that I have worked closely on. This would also allow me to use skills learned in ID.
I’m still very ambitious in my career, but it seems my goals have changed a little as reality settled in. As long as I try I will not have any regrets.
Thanks CG. That’s interesting, however, I don’t want to go to school again. I’m comfortable making money now and I have bills to pay. School isn’t realy an option any longer, thus why I am trying to “shift” my career and not start an entirely new one. If I was, I think I would be an orthodontist. Seriously!! It’s quite fascinating work.
I always found the deep methodology part of ID really interesting and I find it a shame that because many products are designed by extreme cost-cutting efforts deemed necessary because of WalMart, proper development of products is seriously lacking. We’ve gone over this in other threads.
Which is why I might go into product management, development or product sales.
At one point in my ID education I was considering specializing in facial prostheses. A friend of the family invented the field and recently won an award for his work in breast prostheses for post-mastectomy patients (ContourMed Scanning.)
Later in my career I was considering special-effects, and then videogame design.
Since I consider myself an Experience Designer now, I find the developments in Massively-Multiplayer Persistant Online Gaming (or whatever they call it now) to be the most interesting. I love the idea that virtual representations of real-world artifacts actually have a real-world value (virtual objects are commonly bought and sold on e-bay.)
This field will be sucking away huge ID resources in the future (much more-so than the special-FX biz did in the 1990’s IMO.)
Any of these options might provide you with the creative outlet you need without the sucking-feeling of the Wal-Mart vampire.