On Mentorship & Career Planning

UW x Microsoft Mentorship Program Kick-Off Event 

Hosted by the Microsoft Cloud + AI team, there was a great panel discussion about career development. Six people from the team, including researcher, content designer, studio lead, data scientist, UX designer and produce, sat together to talk about what their roles, how they came into this position and their joy and challenges.

Look at the notes I took and you can tell how engaged I am by their discussion. I was also paired up with a mentor, who is currently a website designer in the team and does branding & marketing work for 4 products. Her background was in graphic design, I am very excited to be mentored by her this year. We have decided to meet up monthly and I will come up with the structure of what we are going to discuss. 

The panelists took turns to discuss about what they think is the quality to success. 

Here is the list:

- curiosity   ( agree) 

- empathy  - not only for users, but learning your business and industry 

- ability to zoom out    ( I like this one, similar to the quality needed for architects)

- common sense   ( hard to define) 

- passion ( would be interested to see how one can sustain the passion over courses of decades)

- pokerface  ( perhaps needed when get to a certain level of position juggling politics between different stakeholder, this is my weak point and to be worked on )

What I learnt most from the discussion was their career mistakes:

- " own up to what you don't know "   

(agree, a lot of my seniors in architecture has advised me " Do not be afraid to say I don't know, I will find out and get back to you later". After my 4 years of practice, I started to understand the importance of that. 

- " Soft skills Vs Truth "   ---- Commented by Jona, the Creative Director

( I made this mistake all the time in my practice. Holding onto TRUTH ( pride, ego, righteousness ) does not always work at workplace. In a team dynamics with leaderships and stakeholders, I have yet to learn the soft skills to navigate through politics. Talk with the empathy for stakeholders as well. )

- " Do it all on merit is a myth"  --- Commented by Producer 

( After 4 years of practice, I started to realize how true this is. Career does not progress because I am the most hard-working or thoughtful one behind the scene. Reward is not always proportional to the amount of effort put in. The more important thing is " establish relationship" and " leverage each other's knowledge". All in all, design practice is not an individual task, but team work.)

Another points that really spoke to me was:

- In putting together a design team, the recruiter is always looking for both a " cultural fit" and " cultural add". The team will always benefit from additional perspective. 

- On top of that, what is this potential hire's other passion outside of work? Could they add value to the team by bringing in their other passion? 

  ( Over the years of my architectural practice, I committed the mistake of working too hard on the job assigned in front of me. The fast-paced environment and tight schedule has been driving me to put out whatever fire is right in front of me first. I had no time to think about " design passion " or to reflect on my practice. The very sad thing is my architectural " job" has consumed my life. And I need to do something about it. My near goal is to achieve a work life balance, in which I can still develop a passion outside of work and can feed that energy back into work.)

Then I walked out this event in the vast Microsoft campus, with numerous conference rooms, football field with kids running around on a Friday workday, workers leisurely sitting everywhere chatting about ideas with coworkers. Then I thought, " this is how a workplace could be." Especially for design field, good designs does not come from working 10+ hours a day in front of a computer on the same desk everyday for 4 years. Some people might define this work culture mentality as " millennial lifestyle", but I do see values when people are free from their desks and free from strict work hours and who they interact with throughout the day, they are the most creative, mentally healthy and productive. My ideal workplace is similar to a University Campus, in which people are free to leverage multi-disciplinary resources, cross path with other discipline, free to wander around as needed. Could work is quantified by piece or by quality ? Not by how many hours I spent sitting in office?