The Career Debt of Retraining

Can you make up for the time you invested in a first career?

I’ll replace this eventually. Photo by Rodion Kutsaiev on Unsplash

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…