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The Career Debt of Retraining
Can you make up for the time you invested in a first career?
A lot of us Product Designers have retrained and are or have been old juniors. I am growing a hunch that maybe there’s something messy and universal in what I experienced through late retraining, and the limiting thoughts I had. So here I am, trying to verbalize tangible and subconscious things I have experienced, hoping some people in the community will relate.
I started my career as a Product Designer rather late in my life, eight years ago, just after giving birth to my first child, and after investing seven years of my life in a different field (TL;DR, I worked on all phases of photoshoots). When you read this story, I will very likely have turned forty.
Aging in Tech
The idea of being a junior woman walking towards her forties in Product Design has often been scary. There aren’t many role models in France; you don’t see a lot of silver-haired women in Product Design. I think this explains why I had this preconception that “success” (whatever that means) had to happen sooner rather than later because, at some point, it would be too late to break the glass ceiling.
I eventually found role models in other countries, and it helped me overcome limiting thoughts… but there are sediments of this past mindset in the way I work.
The Career Debt of Retraining
When seeking a first job, you are not too demanding. You mainly want to find a hiring manager who trusts your ability to get up-to-speed and learn fast. It means that sometimes you land jobs at companies that don’t have a strong product maturity, that don’t pay a lot, or that will struggle to help you grow. Do these years count as much as the years you would spend in a mature environment? Feel free to disagree, but my hot take is I don’t think they do. That’s just the name of the game, the “Theory of Special Relativity” applies to work. The impatience it caused me was amplified because I had lost time somewhere else.
Panic can alter one’s judgment, and eight years in, I don’t think my time was lost at all. I had a blast in my past career: I met my husband, found some of my closest friends, learned a ton, built a…
