Want to learn more on how design thinking can help you gain a more meaningful career? We’ve partnered with the author for a free webinar on August 26. Register here.

At MovingWorlds, we’ve worked with hundreds of professionals facing a common problem: they know that they want more purpose in their work and to make a bigger positive impact with their careers, but they aren’t sure where to start. 

If you can relate, you’re definitely not alone. As we ease our way out of the pandemic and into a “new normal,” we’re seeing more interest than ever from professionals who want to make a for-purpose career change. In fact, data shows that more than 40% of the global workforce is considering handing in their notice – a phenomenon that economists have dubbed “The Great Resignation.”  

Whether you’re looking for a new job or want to advance in your current one, this is a great window of opportunity to start taking action towards your for-purpose career goals. We’ve learned a thing or two about what it takes to do that successfully in helping over 250 Global Fellows advance their social impact careers through the MovingWorlds Institute, and in the upcoming webinar “How to Use Design Thinking to Advance Your Social Impact Career in the Post-COVID Era,” we look forward to sharing some of these insights and frameworks with you. 

Two key frameworks: Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design

In the MovingWorlds Institute, we’ve found that successful career transitions consist of many small steps, rather than one big leap. And to clarify what the next best step is, we like to use the frameworks of Design Thinking and Human-Centered Design together.

At its core, Design Thinking is a process to develop better solutions that is rooted in the scientific method. It’s used in the realm of business, science, public policy, and more – and in the MovingWorlds Institute, we also apply it to individual career development.

Design Thinking starts with the core idea that if you’re designing something for an end-user, you first need to really understand who that end-user is: what challenges they face, and what their realities and constraints are. That’s why step one of the process is building empathy with your intended audience. 

The next piece that’s really important is the define stage, which is all about asking questions. A lot of people skip the empathize and define stages and try to jump right into brainstorming tactics, but without the relevant information up front you may end up solving the wrong problem. In the MovingWorlds Institute, we use a practice called “framestorming” to come up with as many questions as possible. You have to define the right problem to be able to solve it, which is why sharpening and defining your questions is one of the first steps of the Design Thinking process.

Once you have the right questions, then it’s time to move into the ideation stage and get to brainstorming. In this stage, you want to really cast a wide net and try to come up with as many ideas as possible. From there, you can then narrow them down through a variety of steps, including prototyping. 

A prototype doesn’t have to be complicated. At the end of the day, it’s just something that you can ship relatively quickly, easily, and cheaply to get feedback on. In the prototype stage, you want your intended audience to be able to play with the prototype, break it, and give you feedback about what they like and don’t like. That moves you into the testing stage, where you can then incorporate the user feedback into your next iteration of the prototype. From there, you continue testing and iterating until you get it right, and because it’s a prototype, you’ll be able to do so without too much up-front investment.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a similar but distinct framework that involves three stages: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. The way we think about HCD is as both as another process that you can follow as well as a value system that maintains the end-user at the center of your work.

The first phase of HCD is inspiration, which similarly to Design Thinking involves casting a wide net: going big, being open to a lot of new ideas, doing research, and having lots of conversations. In this stage, your focus should be on exploring the entire realm of divergent possibilities before committing to a specific idea or solution. 

From there, you move into ideation, which is about converging: coming back together, seeing what the patterns are there, looking at the trends, and really taking stock of what themes are coming out of that inspiration phase. With a few ideas in mind to test, you then diverge again to test a bunch of different prototypes and get user feedback on them. 

That feedback guides us into the implementation phase, where we converge once again around the ideas and prototypes that work, then invest more into implementing. 

In our programs, we actually combine these two processes by laying Human-Centered Design over Design Thinking into something we call “Social Enterprise Thinking.” We think both of these methodologies are important for creating impact, whether that’s for a social enterprise program or product or for transitioning into an impact career.

Applying these frameworks to your own career

The key themes from these frameworks – deeply understanding the person you’re designing for, casting a wide net, taking a hypothesis-driven approach to narrowing and testing potential ideas to find the right next step – are the same elements that form the foundation of a successful career change. 

In this interactive session facilitated by MovingWorlds Institute Director Cole Hoover, you’ll have the opportunity to virtually collaborate in an online Mural board for real-time support working through the empathize, define, ideate, and prototype stages of your career journey. You’ll also be introduced to free resources and templates to support you at each stage, including activities from our 10 step #SocialImpactCareerGuide to help you audit your strengths and zero in on your purpose, worksheets and resources from Designing Your Life, and tools from the Pivot Toolkit. 

Whether you plan to leave your job in search of something better or stay where you are, the frameworks and tools shared in this webinar will help you make the most of the “Great Resignation” to change your career for the better – both in terms of how it fits you, and how it contributes to the kind of world we’re trying to build back better post-COVID. Be sure to register for “How to Use Design Thinking to Advance Your Social Impact Career in the Post-COVID Era” to secure your spot and be part of this inspiring conversation!

 MovingWorlds Institute is a global learning community empowering professionals to use their skills to increase social and environmental impact. Click here to find out more about their Global Fellows program.