My career has moved across an unusual mix of industries. I’ve worked in an agency setting, designed custom screen printed apparel, spent years in luxury beauty, and worked on projects in film and book publishing. It’s not the tidy, single lane resume that’s typical in this field, and I’ve come to believe that range deserves more credit than it gets.
A lot of job postings ask for design experience within a specific industry. Healthcare experience required. SaaS experience required. Beauty experience required. The framing treats industry knowledge as if it were the core skill, when it’s really design thinking that does the heavy lifting.
Design principles transfer. Curiosity about a new industry transfers. The surrounding context, the language, the regulations, the customer habits specific to a category, might not transfer automatically, but it’s generally easy to pick up once you’re in it. I actually love that part. Learning the nuances of a new field is one of my favorite parts of this work.
Apparel is a good example. Working with screen printing meant learning an entirely new set of constraints, from the number of screens available to film costs to how placement affects sizing. None of that was familiar to me at first, but the design thinking underneath it already was, so the learning curve was short. The same thing happened when I moved into beauty. The design principles carried over immediately. What I picked up on top of that was category specific: ingredients, regulatory considerations, and how consumers actually shop.
I’ve stopped viewing a lack of industry specific experience as a gap. I see it now as a genuine strength. Every industry I’ve worked in has sharpened how I think and problem solve in the next one. Designing across so many file types, substrates, and mediums, from packaging to apparel to print to web, has made me more adaptable, not less qualified.
When hiring managers filter for industry niche above all else, they risk passing over designers who have already proven something more valuable: the ability to learn a new category quickly and do excellent work inside it.