Inaugural amUX: Designing Your Career

We’re super excited about this first meetup because we couldn’t have asked for a better speaker to kick us off. Ian Swinson will be joining us and sharing some of his amazing User Experience knowledge.

Agenda:

• 8:30-9am: Breakfast & Networking

• 9:15 – 9:45am: Presentation by Ian Swinson

• 9:45-10am: Q&A

Topic: “Designing Your Career”
As UX professionals we spend a ton of time talking about design and research activities but relatively little time talking about or formalizing a framework for planning and nurturing our careers. While many of us have access to formal career ladders, they are often interesting artifacts, but rarely useful tools to help you plan short-term or long-term goals. In addition years of public and contentious discussions about formalizing the UX profession have spawned lively debates with little concrete progress.

To address this gap Ian Swinson, Senior Director of User Experience at SalesForce.com, conducted interviews with senior User Experience professionals across industries to investigate what have been pivotal moments in their careers. The result is the creation of a UX specific career framework and workshop that helps you systematically think through your skills and interests, then frame those into potential career paths. That insight then enables powerful and directed career conversations between managers and employees. At its core the process treats career planning as a design exercise.

This UX Career Framework is not meant to serve as the ultimate expression of the myriad UX career variations. However, it is a powerful step forward in establishing a dialog about UX careers, what makes them unique, and how we can ultimately take control of our careers and design the future.

Speaker:
Ian Swinson – @iswinson
He is the Senior Director of User Experience at Salesforce.com for the Platform and Analytics teams. He has spent the past 20 years exploring design-focused roles at startups, design agencies, and enterprise software companies.

Ian and his team look at current and emerging design, technology and cultural trends with the goal of making enterprise software as easy to use as consumer web sites. As the future of work is defined Salesforce.com seeks to lead the next phase by empowering all businesses and users with the tools they need to get their work done as efficiently and effectively as possible – and with a real sense of joy and accomplishment.

As a manager Ian is blessed with an extremely talented, well-rounded and wildly enthusiastic team of 30 managers, designers and researchers. Ian is a graduate of McGill University’s Film and Communications program, an ex-hardcore musician, and currently a Category 3 road racer, amateur photographer and hopeless optimist.