A love letter to every designer drowning in courses while their dreams collect dust
Last Tuesday, my friend Sarah called me crying.
Not the dramatic, something-terrible-happened kind of crying. The quiet, exhausted kind that comes from spending nine months preparing for a career that keeps moving further away the harder you chase it.
"I just finished another $300 course," she said. "The instructor mentioned three new tools I've never heard of. I feel like I'm running backward."
Sarah has 47 certificates. A Notion database with 200+ bookmarked "must-learn" resources. She can tell you the difference between atomic design and material design in her sleep. She's memorized every UX law from Fitts to Miller.
She's also never designed anything that a real human being has actually used.
And honestly? That used to be me.
My Own Descent into Course Hell
Ten years ago, I was Sarah. Different name, same spreadsheet of skills I "needed" before I could call myself a real designer.
My morning routine was pathological: Wake up, check what new course dropped on which platform, panic about not knowing [insert trendy methodology], add it to cart, feel temporarily better about my future.
I had this fantasy that one day I'd cross some invisible finish line. I'd know enough. The anxiety would stop. Companies would somehow sense my completion percentage and throw offers at me.
Spoiler alert: There is no finish line. There's just more track.
The course creators know this. Hell, they're banking on it.
The Day I Realized It Was All Bullshit
I was on course number 23 (yes, I kept count) when the instructor said something that made me want to throw my laptop across the room:
"Now that you understand the theory, you'll want to take my advanced course where we put it into practice."
Practice. In another course. For another $199.
That's when it hit me: I was paying someone to teach me how to prepare to potentially maybe one day do the thing I claimed I wanted to do.
It was like taking swimming lessons in a parking lot. Sure, you're learning the motions, but you're never getting wet.
Let's Talk About What Nobody Wants to Admit
The online education complex has weaponized our imposter syndrome. They've turned "continuous learning" from a healthy professional habit into a full-blown anxiety disorder.
Every morning, my LinkedIn feed assaults me with the same message dressed in different clothes:
- "The skill that's replacing UX research in 2024!"
- "Why designers who don't know [X] will be unemployed by December"
- "I made $500k after learning this ONE weird Figma trick"
It's exhausting. It's manipulative. And it's working.
We've created an entire generation of designers who are professional students. They're so busy learning how to design that they never actually... design anything.
The Real Talk Nobody's Having
Here's what actually happens when you get a design job:
Nobody cares about your certificates. I mean it. Nobody.
Your manager won't ask if you completed the Advanced Prototyping Masterclass. They'll ask if you can fix the checkout flow that's hemorrhaging customers.
Your team won't quiz you on design thinking frameworks. They'll need you to explain why the engineering team should spend three sprints rebuilding something that "already works."
Users definitely won't care about your course completions. They just want the damn app to let them reset their password without wanting to punch their screen.
What Working Designers Actually Do All Day
After I finally stopped taking courses and started taking jobs (messy, unglamorous, real jobs), I discovered what designers actually need to know:
How to argue without being an asshole. Because you'll spend more time defending your design decisions than making them. And if you can't explain why the button should be blue without sounding like a pretentious design blog, you've already lost.
How to ship something you hate. Your beautiful, user-tested, pixel-perfect design will get butchered by legal requirements, technical constraints, and that one executive who insists everything needs more "pop." Learning to find small wins in compromised solutions is a survival skill.
How to translate feelings into features. Not in some woo-woo way. I mean literally sitting with users who are frustrated to the point of tears and figuring out which specific interaction is making them want to throw their phone. Then fixing it with the three days and zero budget you've been given.
How to care less (strategically). You can't die on every hill. Learning which battles matter and which ones are just your ego talking will save your sanity and your career.
None of this comes from courses. It comes from doing the work, badly, repeatedly, until you get less bad at it.
The Portfolio Piece That Changed Everything
Want to know the project that finally got me hired? It wasn't some pristine case study with perfect process documentation.
It was a janky Chrome extension I built to fix my uncles's most-hated website.
My uncle, who types with two fingers and thinks "the cloud" is suspicious, couldn't figure out how to pay his water bill online. The city's website was a masterpiece of bureaucratic user hostility.
So I spent a weekend hacking together something that just... fixed it. Auto-filled the confusing forms. Highlighted the actually important information. Added a big, impossible-to-miss "PAY BILL" button.
It was ugly. It broke half the time. It only worked for one specific website in one specific city.
It also solved a real problem for a real person who was really pissed off.
That messy little project taught me more about design than two years of courses combined. It also gave me the best interview story I've ever had. Turns out, hiring managers love hearing about times you solved actual problems for actual humans.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Design Skills
Most of us already know enough to start. We just don't want to admit it because starting is terrifying.
Courses feel safe. There's a syllabus, a progress bar, a certificate at the end. You can't really fail at watching videos and completing exercises.
Real projects? Those can fail spectacularly. You might design something nobody uses. You might not know how to handle client feedback. You might realize you're not as good as you thought you were.
But here's the thing: You learn more from one failed real project than from ten successful course completions.
What Sarah Did Next
Remember Sarah from the beginning? I convinced her to try an experiment: One month, no courses. Instead, she had to ship one thing per week. Anything. Didn't matter how small or silly.
Week 1: She redesigned her apartment building's catastrophically bad laundry room sign-up sheet. Printed it. Hung it up. People actually used it.
Week 2: Made a simple website for her cousin's dog-walking business. It had five pages and one contact form. Her cousin cried with happiness.
Week 3: Created a Chrome extension that blocked course platform websites between 9 AM and 5 PM. (I'm not joking. She actually did this.)
Week 4: Redesigned the donation flow for a local animal shelter's website. Sent it to them unsolicited. They implemented two of her suggestions.
Four weeks. Four real things in the world. Zero certificates earned.
She got her first design interview the next month. They spent the entire time talking about the laundry room sign.
So What Now?
If you're sitting on twenty tabs of course landing pages right now, here's my advice:
Close them. All of them.
Pick the ugliest, most broken thing you interact with regularly. Could be an app, a website, a paper form at your dentist's office. Doesn't matter.
Fix it. Or try to. You'll probably make it worse at first. That's fine.
The point isn't to create something perfect. It's to create something. To move from learning about design to doing design. To stop preparing for a career and start having one, even if it's messy and small and starts with redesigning your building's laundry sign-up sheet.
The Plot Twist
Here's what the course sellers won't tell you: Every working designer still feels like they don't know enough. We all google basic stuff daily. We all have imposter syndrome. We all look at job postings and think "I only know 60% of this."
The difference between working designers and eternal students isn't knowledge. It's the willingness to jump in at 60% and figure out the rest as we go.
Your incomplete knowledge is enough to help someone with something. Today. Right now. Without taking another course.
Final Thought (Or Whatever)
The design education industry thrives on making you feel perpetually unprepared. They profit from your insecurity. They've turned professional development into a subscription service where the bill never stops coming and the product never quite delivers what you need.
But you don't need their permission to start designing. You don't need their certificates to solve problems. You don't need to know everything to know enough.
You just need to stop learning and start doing.
Even if it's messy. Even if it's small. Even if it's just making a better sign for your apartment's laundry room.
That's where real design careers begin. Not in course catalogs or certificate frames, but in the messy, imperfect act of trying to make something slightly less frustrating for another human being.
Sarah gets that now. She's stopped collecting certificates and started collecting problems to solve.
Her course completion rate has plummeted. Her design skills have never been stronger.
Funny how that works.
P.S. - If you're reading this while procrastinating on another course purchase, consider this your sign to close that tab and go fix something broken instead. The worst that happens is you'll have tried. That already puts you ahead of everyone still watching introduction videos.
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