[Sigia-l] What happened to the good IAs

[Giovanni Fortezza]

I am not looking to deny anybody, however you have to be a good IA that can
align business objectives with user needs with technology in mind to support
it all without losing sight of the big strategic vision. Making wireframes,
flowcharts is not enough to be considered senior. I don't deny that some
people are very bright and can pull it through but that is not the majority.

I started at Microsoft in 1996 when Information Architects was about to be
published. When the title did not exist yet, I started with UI design and
lots of common sense, grew to IA and so on. 5 years later I was offered a
Senior title. I am more than happy to train and mentor Junior IAs but they
are already senior after their first project.

  

-----Original Message-----
From: Dmitry Nekrasovski [mailto:mail.dmitry at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2007 6:16 PM
To: Giovanni Fortezza
Cc: SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] What happened to the good IAs

The question of "what level of experience makes an IA/UX person
senior" seems to be a recurrent theme on this list in the past year or
so. I empathize with hiring managers who are having to make this call
on a daily basis without a clear basis for decision making.

At the same time, I'd like to point out that many of these hiring
managers started their UX careers in the late 90's, when all you
really needed to call yourself a Web/design professional was a pulse.

It seems a bit hypocritical to me that some of them now want to deny
recent entrants to the field the kind of rapid career progression they
had enjoyed themselves.

Dmitry

On 6/20/07, Giovanni Fortezza <giovanni at fortezza.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have been on the list for a while and follow conversations as much as I
> can and was wondering whether anyone else is currently having these
> problems.
>
> In the New York market there is a shortage of Junior IAs and IAs but there
> are plenty of Senior IAs. Which would suggest that there are no IAs
entering
> the workforce, however that doesn't seem to be the case. The majority of
the
> senior IAs I am interviewing are at best Junior and the rest are certainly
> not senior.
>
> That raises the issue that have seen on this list in the past, should
there
> be some kind of certification or a certain number of years/projects or
both
> that an IA should have under their belt in order to move up a level?
>
> I understand the issues around it i.e. who gets to decide what the
criteria
> is, who will enforce it and so on. But I feel that as professionals whose
> primary objective is the development of a great experience we need to do
> this. I have some more ideas as to how to pull this off but I was curious
as
> to what the rest of the community feels.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Giovanni Fortezza
>
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