Vol. 014 - How I become a $200k designer

Hi designers,

Welcome to Vol. 014 of the UX Jetpack Newsletter, where I share job searching tips weekly. This week we are talking about:

How I become a $200k designer?
How can you gain an advantage in job searching?
Never run out of inspiration for your next web design project
Are you curious about how much you can make in UX for 2023? 💰✨

If you enjoy those tips, please consider sharing them with your friends. They can sign up at https://uxjetpack.com/newsletter

How I become a $200k designer?

A brief history of my design journey

Website Designer - $40,000 CAD

I landed this job at a small marketing agency after graduating. However, I quickly realized it wasn't the right fit for me. I’m pretty good at designing websites, but designing websites for clients doesn’t excite me. This position required a lot of branding design, which I was not good at it back then. So this was a short-lived 3 month job.

Product Designer - $40,000 CAD raised to $45,000 CAD a year later.

This is my first real product designer job, but It took me 6 months to find it. I really wanted to work in a bigger company to learn from other designers, but only startups would interview me. So I ended up at this early stage ed-tech startup, the whole company had around 10 people. While it’s not my ideal position, I learned so much about building products, collaborating with other functions, designing within constraints, and even coding. I also had a chance to get involved in sales and custom service. However, we could sell it to enough customers, and the company pivoted to be more of a marketing agency. So I had to find a new job.

Product Designer - $130,000 USD (base), raised to $200,000 USD (all cash)

For this job, I started my job searching on Sept 2019, and accepted the offer on Sept 2020. It was a stressful time. The company worked on COVID-19 testing, which means I got to work on something in a massive scale. At its peak, we had millions of visitors on our websites per month. It was also during an extremely chaotic time in the world, which forced me to grow so much as a designer. Because I learned this opportunity from my mentor at ADPList, I decided to become a mentor myself to give back to the community. That is probably the best decision I’ve made in my life, it sets the course for my later career.

Solopreneur - $0

The company I was with was no longer the right place for me to grow as a designer. It had always been my dream to be a solopreneur, to build something on my own. With enough savings to sustain myself for a while, I quit my job. I had different ideas on what I wanted to do with my own business. After trying a few things out, it made the most sense for me to continue building what I started on ADPList. I can combine my interests in design and mentorship to help other designers. If I can turn this into a business, that’s the best thing in both worlds.