A career in IA
- You already have skills
- I see leaders in product management and UX being increasingly aware that information is really the product they’re working on; everything else is window dressing.
- Understanding systems & structures
- Nothing is natural, inevitable, or neutral
- Synthesizing information from several different sources or stakeholders.
- Scale
- The first job is the hardest
- Don’t accept anything abusive, unethical, etc. obviously, but your first job is about getting you other options.
- Titles don’t matter at entry level.
- Taxonomy is high demand but low value. IA is low demand but high value.
- Don’t take advice from anyone over 30. Including me. And by that I really mean people who are 8-10 years into the field. It was so different when we started out, and we’ve forgotten what it’s like to not have options.
- Part of the reason we’ve forgotten is that time is linear, and we’ve put years into our networks. It’s very hard to network well enough to get yourself a job in two months. It’s very easy to network well enough to get yourself a job in two years. Make friends and wait ten years.
- Networking is ultimately not about extracting value from another person. Part of making it not feel gross, especially if you’re an introvert, is accepting that you have something of value to give another person. They might like talking to you or spending time with you.
- FOLLOW UP. Nobody ever does this, but it’s how you build relationships.
- Being junior is mostly requirements in and specifications out. This is a good thing to master, but you don’t want to stay in that space very long.
- Good things in an early job that you might not know to value:
- Getting to be in a lot of meetings with people who are good at some aspect of their job (client management, presentation, simplifying complex ideas, reading an org)
- Interviewing and hiring other people (if you do enough of this, you won’t be scared anymore)
- Chances to make bad decisions, without it being catastrophic
- Exposure to the business side of things. How does the budget work? What is the impact of work being expensive or cheap?
- Don’t accept anything abusive, unethical, etc. obviously, but your first job is about getting you other options.
- Midlevel, building seniority
- People will tell you that you just need more time. In reality, time is usually a proxy for building these skills, I find:
- Awareness of traps
- Building too complex too fast
- Maintenance
- Ontological purity
- Anything that starts with “why don’t we just” AI, ML, tool of the moment fits here
- Assessing organizational readiness
- Adjusting communication
- Influence without authority
- Engaging collaborators and getting people to get things done
- Knowing what you’re good at and where you need to lean on others
- Identifying and mitigating interpersonal/inter-team issues
- Awareness of traps
- Once you have some good ideas about what you’re particularly good at, you can start leaning in to those things
- What can you do that scares other people?
- What are you good at that annoys other people?
- I tell my devs, if I do my job, you never have to decide what goes in a dropdown again. You never have to decide what something is called again.
- People will tell you that you just need more time. In reality, time is usually a proxy for building these skills, I find:
- Being senior
- Senior is mostly about ambiguity in and clarity out (h/t Karl Fast)
- I largely expect a junior and a senior IA to produce outputs of the same quality; the major difference is the amount of volatility, ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty they can deal with to get to an equivalently good outcome
- This is when having a personal brand (barf) actually becomes relevant.
- A personal brand isn’t having a specific color associated with you (I have actually been given this advice), it’s where being a likely person to call for a certain kind of work. That will probably be a pretty nuanced kind of work that you don’t realize exists yet and it will change as your skills and aspirations change
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