Does your job title even matter any more?
I had a mail from a friend the other day asking if I had an idea of the sort of salary a senior designer should command in the North of England. Tough one as you can imagine, there a ton of factors but one thing got me thinking about what a Senior Designer (and all job titles) actually is any more.
Job titles in some agencies are becoming more of a nonsense anyway (WuFoo employ Chris Coyier as “Lead hucklebucker“) and there are more than enough designers and developers with “Senior” in their titles and they’ve only been working for a year or two.
It’s simply not as cut and dried a career path as it perhaps was a few years back when you typically went along the traditional Junior > Middleweight > Senior > Etc career path and often salaries were advertised when now more often than not you see the “dependent on experience”. In bigger agencies, this sort of path still exists but the age/experience/talent split is certainly different to years back.
On the one hand, I don’t really like it because often it can lead to a vast gulf in what a person in one agency and the same person in a different agency can earn and it sometimes comes down to bluffing about your skill and being cocky asking for money but on the other hand it’s great that our industry places a great emphasis on being good at the job rather than time served.
Hooray for meritocracy.