Become A Hybrid Designer

Anastasia Kashkinova explores how moving beyond your regular domain expertise to retrain as a designer-developer hybrid can unlock opportunities for professional and personal growth

- Anastasia Kashkinova

“Should coders design?” “Should designers code?”

These types of questions have been gaining quite a lot of traction recently. This spike in interest on the topic of cross-domain professionals should come as no surprise, given the number of startups keeps growing exponentially. To accommodate scarce resources, teams have been shrinking and design and development cycles have been shortening.

That isn’t to say large corporations do not also see immense value in a hybrid skill set. Many are looking for professionals to bridge the gap between design and development and oversee the whole process. High-profile tech companies like Google, IBM and Microsoft have openings for cross-functional professionals with both development and design expertise; a recent example is the proliferation of openings with the title ‘UX engineer’. Other jobs worth exploring are creative technologist, creative developer, UI/UX developer and more obvious roles that feature ‘hybrid’ or ‘designer/developer’ in the title.

The 2019 report The Hybrid Job Economy by Burning Glass International Inc, based on its database of nearly a billion job postings, found that one in eight jobs now requires a hybrid skill set, with “intersection of design and development” being one of the top five key skill areas (https://netm.ag/31AX80J). This doesn’t mean specialists in either design or development will fall out of favour anytime soon but it is indicative of a shift for those in tech careers.

The good thing is that every designer or developer can learn about the other domain and build up their proficiency with relative ease if they so decide.

Gain design skills as a developer

Why learn design?