How to Apply Design Thinking to Your Post-Grad Plans

As December grads get ready to celebrate and many students are already thinking ahead to accepting their diploma in May, I know what comes after graduation is at the top of students' minds. I’m also very aware of the pressure students may feel to have a job lined up ahead of turning their tassel. As these students balance school, internships, and activities, they’re also taking on the time-intensive load of applying to full-time roles. 

Job searching can feel like an overwhelming and frustrating process. The endless cycle of writing cover letters, filling out applications, and potentially not hearing back from prospective employers can lead to burnout. If you’ve found yourself at this stage of the process, I encourage you to explore the design thinking principles below to hopefully help you find new solutions in your search. 

What is Design Thinking?

In the counterculture movement of the 1960s, a time teeming with new ways of thinking, the earliest glimpses of human-centered design and design thinking were born. The worlds of architecture and product design began to move away from the sciences and towards an approach that put humans at its center.

Design thinking is a process for creative problem-solving that helps a person move past the first “good ideas” and discover creative solutions. This process can be applied to your life, according to Ayse Birsel, author of “Design the Life You Love”, because “Life is just like a design project. It’s full of constraints, money, age, location, circumstances.” 

The principles of design thinking are shaped by their approach of empathy, how this thinking challenges assumptions, and prototyping and testing multiple solutions. When applied to life, this includes how we reframe how we address ourselves, our willingness to be open to multiple paths, and how we continuously shape our lives based on circumstances.

As we plan our lives, it’s important to remember that life will always come with unexpected challenges and setbacks. The co-founders of Stanford University’s Life Design Lab,Wiliam Burnett and David Evans coined the term “wicked problems” to describe problems for which the criteria constantly change, like your own life—and they promise real, human tools to solve them. They specifically set out on a mission to help students "apply the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after college."  

By placing yourself as the designer of your life, you have a new framework in which to see how you’ll approach it. These principles can help guide you as you navigate the pressures and unknowns of the job market. 

“In design thinking, we put as much emphasis on problem finding as we do on problem-solving.  

After all, what’s the point of working on the wrong problem?” 

– Designing Your Life, William Burnett and David Evans

As you begin designing your life, I’ve outlined a few steps inspired by these design thinking principles you can take to apply to your own job search. 

Applying Design Thinking to Your Job Search

Step 1: Start Where You Are

The first step is taking a step back. To figure out where you want to go next, first establish where you are right now. We often get caught up thinking about everything we want to do next without acknowledging how far we’ve come. Reflect on your skills, experiences, and strengths in your field of study. Create a clear picture in your mind of who you are. By stripping away the things you can’t control, you can more easily identify what you can. 

Step 2: Define and Redefine

Next, you want to think about the beliefs you hold about yourself that prevent you from moving forward—your limiting beliefs. To combat these limiting beliefs, you want to use the design thinking principle of reframing. A reframe is a perspective switch. It’s what helps you articulate the right problems to find the right solutions. By reframing these beliefs, you can see more clearly the steps you need to take to move the self you defined in Step 1 toward your next goal. 

Start by listing out the current beliefs you feel could be holding you back. Next to each belief, try to write a sentence or two that shifts the perspective of this problem.

Step 3: Map Your Paths

With a clear vision of who you currently are and a new perspective on beliefs that could be holding you back, it’s time to map out where you potentially want to go next. List 2-3 paths your career could take in the next 3-5 years. Don’t be afraid to get really specific! Is there a city you’ve thought about moving to? What do you want your daily responsibilities in your role to look like on Day 1 vs Year 3? Plot all the ways you would be happy with the path unfolding into a timeline. 

Take a step back to see if any patterns appear in every timeline. Look for any throughlines that show in how you describe what kind of job you’ll be doing or specific ways you see yourself advancing your career. These maps should help guide you through the noise of job searching. By having a clear idea of what job titles, descriptions, and cities you’re looking for, you’ll be better equipped for moving that currently defined self along the path.  

Step 4: Test and Test Again 

Testing is potentially the most important step in design thinking. Testing gives you the freedom to try things without the pressure of getting them right the first time. Through the process of mapping, you should have a clearer idea of what paths you should begin ‘testing’ in your life. Without as much of the noise of what you could be doing or what others are doing, you’ll be able to hone in on approaches to take in your post-grad plans. 

To start this testing journey, get organized for how you’ll approach each ‘path.’ For example, you may have one path where you see yourself becoming an event producer in Boston but another where you become an events marketing manager in New York City. To begin ‘testing’ these paths, you can use tools like Excel, AI, and LinkedIn to organize your approach to both. You can use these tools to create a list of event marketing jobs in New York and then use AI to continuously tweak your resume and cover letter to each one. You’ll be better equipped to apply through the bulk of jobs in mass. With a clear vision and tools to guide you, you will hopefully cut down on the burnout of applying and set yourself up for success as defined by you. 

Step 5: See Where the Path Takes You 

Finally, as any designer knows well—you can plan, and test, and hope for the best, but ultimately there is no way to predict what will happen. However, if you do start down a path and find that it’s not shaking out to be what you were hoping for, the good news is that you’ve already done the work to think about another path that might be the right fit. And now, through this exercise you’ll have the right mindset to reframe and tools ready for testing a new path!