Self Evaluation
Here are a few techniques on evaluating yourself:
- Skills review — List your skills, rate them on some sort of scale, compare to your contemporaries with similar roles then best in class designers to find where you really sit on the spectrum.
- Compare your recent work vs. your past work to determine how far you’ve come.
- Public Sentiment — Are your public portfolios well reviewed? Do your clients recommend you to other clients?
- Professional portfolio critique — Have a fancy pants look at your work. *Pro Tip* Take with a grain of salt. When you put people in a position of expertise they tend to believe it a little too hard.
- Success stories — Can you explain why and what you did was good, for you or your client?
- Failures — Do you have work that totally bombed? If so can you pull any lessons from that?
- Look at a job description for a gig you would love, can you fulfill all the requirements? Or do you fall short in certain areas?
- Corporate boilerplate survey questions — What are your goals moving forward? What do you need to learn/do to get there? Where do you want to be in 10 years? Describe how you’ll achieve this to someone that understands nothing about your industry.