Where can senior professionals in tech find support?
Meeting of the Austin User Experience Professionals’ Association circa 2012
The more senior you are, the less likely you are to attend professional events. So where can senior professionals in tech find support?
I was sad to learn about IxDA’s shutdown. IxDA was a big part of my professional identity as a junior- to mid-level UX researcher.
At the same time, it’s also been 8 years since I attended an Interaction-style conference, and nearly a decade since I attended an official IxDA event.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about how UX as a discipline has changed. But I’ve found myself thinking more about professional community, and how the needs of senior practitioners are so different from when we are earlier in our career.
Way back in 2011 and 2012, Vitorio Miliano and I collaborated on large-scale surveys of the Austin UX community, and we noticed this trend: the more senior you are, the less likely you are to attend professional events.
“The more senior you are, the less likely you are to attend professional events.”
This is not because senior practitioners don’t need community, but because the kind of community you need is so much harder to get.
When I was a junior researcher, IxDA gave me two things I needed:
Professional connections
New professional skills
Senior professionals need these things too, but as you become more experienced, the bar gets higher:
You have less time and more people wanting it, so it’s more important for each new connection to be meaningful.
When you’ve been working in industry for years, it gets harder to find skills training at your level (or that is even relevant when you’re no longer executing, but directing).
It’s an interesting coincidence, then, that IxDA is folding at a time when the original audience it served in 2005 is now in senior roles, with needs that are much harder to address.
But the need for professional community is still there; senior professionals just have to address it in different ways.
What can support networks look like for senior professionals in tech?
How can you assemble a community around you that helps you thrive as a leader?
As you become more senior, then, you spend less time on networking and professional organizations, and more time connecting with colleagues, past and present, that know you.
Unfortunately, while this support is invaluable, your colleagues can’t help with every business problem you face. You may not know someone who’s an expert in a particular emerging technology, or who’s implemented the specific process you need to implement.
So where do you turn for help?
In my practice, I’ve learned to reach out to other experts—to literally hire consultants. In addition to the specialists that make it possible to run my business, I’ve leaned on other types of experts to understand complex legal, industry, and technical questions that would have been slow or risky to answer myself.
Slack and LinkedIn have made access to specialized communities easier, but there’s a lot of noise in these channels, and it can be iffy and time-consuming to find good information.
I’ve recognized that my time is too valuable to spend it combing through forums or taking generic online courses. A good consultant scales my impact by providing expertise tailored to my needs, level, and context–just like a trusted colleague would do.
Each new expert in my professional community has enabled me to solve entirely new types of problems, and, as a bonus, has expanded my access to other types of specialists in their networks.
My personal expertise is in spatial computing, physical AI, and innovation processes. If you need help with any of these things, let’s chat! And if you’re looking for some other type of support, let me know–maybe one of my colleagues can help you out.