Dear Danielle,
I got some amazing news last week that absolutely made my day: a mentee of mine finally landed a job after months of searching and interviewing!! (LFG!!) It was truly blood, sweat and tears.
They landed an entry level position at a large Canadian company. It’s not their dream job per se, but it sounded like a great opportunity for someone who’s been trying to break into the industry. As we have received many questions on this, getting the foot in the door is often the hardest part for junior designers and researchers.
At the same time, I can’t help but wonder (and worry) how well my mentee is going to be supported by their new team, new manager and the larger org. Especially as UX continues to face the onslaught of AI mandates and the pressure to demonstrate the impact of such tools as an industry.
But zooming out, the larger picture I worry about more is how tempted, or even forced, the new UXer cohorts are going to be to take shortcuts.
I’ve written about this before: AI is giving researchers at all levels something we’ve been asking for for years. By offloading many tasks like tagging, synthesis and analysis, either partially or completely to AI, we now have more time to think. More time to be strategic. More time to actually influence the things we’ve always said we wanted to influence. Many of us would agree it’s truly been a gift.
But gaining something usually means giving something up too, whether we notice it happening or not. The work many of us have been able to offload to AI, we can offload because we already built the judgement and deep intuition to assess whether the output is any good. That judgement was honed through the slow, unglamorous work of sitting with transcripts, tagging themes, writing and rewriting the insights until 5pm on a Friday.
What I worry about now is that a lot of that unglamorous work, the work that quietly built our judgement, has disappeared from the career path entirely under the pressure of speed. And our juniors may be paying for it without knowing what they’re missing.
I’m reminded of my first years as a junior research analyst. I remember the specific feeling of being handed a stack of raw transcripts with no shortcut through them, and how much of a slog it was: reading through every sentence, highlighting key phrases, grouping them into themes. At the time I didn’t know I was building anything. It just felt like the job. It was the job! Today’s junior researcher is far more likely to be handed an AI-generated synthesis and asked to sanity-check it. Faster, yes. But they’re starting one step removed from the thing that actually taught me how to trust my own read on a transcript. They’re evaluating a conclusion instead of arriving at one.
What’s essentially happening is the apprenticeship model that quietly trained a generation of senior UXers is collapsing, and I don’t think many of us in more senior positions are being honest about what that means, or what we owe.
So what do we do as leaders? I don’t think the answer is to stop using AI. But I do think it means something changes for those of us who have already built the thing AI is now doing. If the messy work no longer happens naturally, we as leaders have to build and facilitate an environment to make it happen deliberately. Give the junior designers a bit more time to wireframe instead of jumping straight into AI prototyping. Pull a junior researcher into an actual synthesis session led by a senior UXR. Let them sit (or perhaps even force them to sit) with the ambiguity before the machine resolves it. Give them work AI could do, but don’t always let it.
I keep thinking about what it took to build the judgment I now get to use all day, and I’m not sure I would have built it any other way. My mentee starts their new job in a couple of weeks, genuinely thrilled, and so am I for them. I just can’t shake the question of whether the version of this job they’re walking into still has room to build what I built. And if it doesn’t, what our responsibility is to make that room ourselves.
From teaching my 8 y/o how to do proper push-ups so she can start building the reps,
Dave