So, I’m a millennial and, as such, I’ve only been working in the field of International (Global) Development now for about four years. It’s always been my primary career choice and has been rewarding in several respects. But lately I’ve had to come to terms w/ the fact that in the long-run this line of work may not be for me.

I’ve always known the downsides of this career choice but while training in my 20s, the benefits far outweighed them. Now that I’m beginning my 30s, I’m finding that the scales are starting to tip the other way, which was confirmed after recently becoming an uncle.

So, knowing I now need to make a pivot in my life, I’m presented w/ a dilemma:  What kind of work can I do that takes what I love the most about my current work and leaves behind what I don’t?

My first step was to conduct an easy LinkedIn search of people in my budding network who’ve also earned an “MPA” to see what they’ve done w/ the degree and to hopefully become inspired enough by their work to reapply mine towards a different focus.

I found a fellow City Year alumna who went to NYU and was now working for the Mayor’s Office of NYC as a User Experience Designer. While chatting over the phone and discussing her client-based projects and concentration in school, how she applies her degree to her work and how much she enjoys doing it, I took note of some terms she used that I recall being sporadically used in graduate school like “design thinking” and “service design.”

My professors grouped these research methodologies all together into more academic and antiquated terms like “action research” and “stakeholder-inclusive.” This was the means by which my colleagues and I were trained to practice. In fact, it was so much of a cornerstone in our process that it was easy to take for granted as standard practice. My blinders were definitely on in school b/c I never really noticed how this type of research was being used in other fields around me, like local government, technology or even healthcare.

Considering, I just completed a 6mo fellowship exploring local government as a career option, I thought this might be a good place to start. Unfortunately, my city isn’t fully on the design train yet, despite being the center of Silicon Valley. Cities like NYC and Oakland both far surpass my local governments’ current capacities to leverage service design as a tool for progress. Before digging into how I could push it forward anyway though (e.g. as a consultant or educator) I wanted to learn more about how this all applies to tech.

After a few more Google searches, blog posts and articles, I discovered a set of videos produced by Khan Academy on Product Designers that really spoke to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z52LuDcjxFk&list=PLeWdbgQmAbYHF-nCHJMqjisEcDxUfocKP 

and then another set on UX Researchers that spoke more specifically to my background:

I was so stoked to know that the work I’d been doing was actually quite similar to not just any subfield in tech but one that really excited me and would allow me to continue working for mission-driven organizations!

When I stumbled upon an article written last year by a UX Researcher for Facebook/Instagram in NYC named Jennifer Romano Bergstrom though about applying international user-experience research to people in crisis, I felt like I won the lotto. This was the critical piece that really inspired me to act on my thoughts of pivoting my career and to actually do it: to market my training to a whole new, thrilling field of potential employers.

https://medium.com/@20romano/international-ux-research-for-people-in-crisis-6b25f7064be8

(Don’t you want to work w/ Jennifer now too?! 😲)

The basic difference b/n what I’ve been doing and what Jennifer does is really for whom we’re designing these experiences for. See, Jennifer investigates how to better design features specific to Facebook/Instagram to be more useful to the real world experiences of the social media giant’s users. Comparatively, my background has been in the systematic investigation of how to design the experiences of constituents under specific legislative policies and/or the beneficiaries of socioeconomic development programs funded by government and run by community-based organizations.

In other words, Jennifer focusses more on “Design Thinking” as a methodology used to innovate/solve business problems, whereas I focussed more on “Service Design,” applying design thinking and its methodologies into imaterial products (D.Rebelo, 2015).

I think if I can articulate this difference well enough to tech recruiters, who almost always seem unfamiliar w/ the field of international development, I could convey how hiring an untraditional candidate like myself w/ a background in applied social sciences could benefit their organization in a user experience research role.