How Do You Know If You’re Mid-Level or Senior as a Designer?

In a recent coaching session, a designer asked me a question I often hear:

How can I tell if I’m mid-level or senior? I don’t have that many years of experience.

It is a common fear, because years of experience often get treated as shorthand for level. But in reality, skill and influence grow in different ways and at different speeds.

When I thought about my response, I found myself reflecting on the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. It describes how people progress from beginner to expert in any skill:

1. Novice – follows rules rigidly, unsure how to adapt.

2. Advanced beginner – starting to see patterns, but still relies on guidance.

3. Competent – can plan, prioritize, and deliver with more independence.

4. Proficient – sees the bigger picture, makes good judgments, though still deliberate at times.

5. Expert – operates with fluid, intuitive decision-making built on deep experience.

In design, these stages often translate to how much you rely on direction, how confidently you navigate ambiguity, and how much influence you have beyond your own tasks.

The Mid-Level Shift: The Competent Designer

As you step into mid-level, you move into the Competent stage. Instead of just applying what you learned in a textbook or training, you begin structuring your own workflow and making intentional choices about how to approach each problem. You can reliably own a feature or project from start to finish, even in ambiguous situations.

The Senior Shift: The Proficient Designer

The shift to senior is a move toward Proficient (and sometimes Expert). At this stage, your design process feels intuitive. You are not only solving the problem in front of you. You are also recognizing when the problem itself needs to be reframed.

A mid-level designer can execute effectively against a defined problem. A senior designer instinctively sees when the definition is incomplete, misaligned, or missing context. You do not just ask, “How do I design this feature?”  You also ask, “Is this the right problem to solve, and is it the right way to frame it?”

That is the shift: moving from excellent execution to shaping the direction of the work itself.

From Deliberate to Intuitive

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains this as the difference between two systems of thought:

System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful.

System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

Early in your career, most of design lives in System 2. You carefully follow steps, check the rules, and double-guess decisions.

As you grow, more of your practice shifts into System 1. Synthesis, critiques, and collaboration start to flow naturally, freeing up your energy for leadership: guiding others, shaping strategy, and making trade-offs at a higher level.

Readiness Is Defined by Ownership, Influence, and Leadership

So how do you measure readiness in your day-to-day work? Not by the years on your résumé, but by these signals:

Ownership

You can take a complex, ambiguous problem and drive it to a solution with minimal oversight. You do not just execute, you define execution and success.

Influence

Your focus expands beyond your own designs, shaping product strategy, mentoring junior designers, and collaborating cross-functionally to raise the quality of work around you.

Leadership through Intuition

Your process feels fluid, like conducting an orchestra. Research, critique, facilitation, and design decisions happen with ease. You create the conditions where good design thrives.

The Real Measure of Readiness

Years of experience are simply the time it takes to encode patterns into intuition. But the true measure of readiness is not the clock. It is the fluency, ownership, and influence you bring, the point when you are not only designing solutions but also shaping the environment where great design happens.

That is when you know you have stepped into senior.