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Stand Out for the Right Roles by Doing What 90% of Juniors Don’t 🎯

Learn how to define and sharpen your positioning to attract roles that actually fit your strengths

Author

Florian Bölter
April 09, 2025

Together with

Sera Tajima

Hey and welcome back to a new week! 👋 

In this issue:

  • Find YOUR Positioning and Attract the Right Roles: I’ll show you how to identify your strengths and play them right.

  • Supercharge your Growth: Get a free sample of Sera’s new course to start attract hiring managers and skyrocket your career’s growth.

  • Pegah’s Portfolio: A masterclass in keeping it simple and including all the right things.

🤝 TODAY’S PARTNER

The Growth Designer Path: From Junior to Purpose-Driven Contributor Struggling to attract hiring managers and find purpose?

  • Master growth design fundamentals that connect creativity to business outcomes

  • Learn how to measure impact, influence stakeholders, and create solutions for a sustainable future

  • Turn your design skills into strategic value—without years of trial and error

At my company, we realized that we've been missing a lot in our product development. The consciousness is growing amongst team members now that we've agreed on our North Star Metric. Thank you very much, Sera, for your course. Honestly, it is the best investment so far this year in my life.

– Elvis

FINAL OPPORTUNITY: Get Sera Tajima's course before prices increase next week

✨ Top Jobs This Week

Stand Out for the Right Roles by Doing What 90% of Juniors Don’t 🎯

There’s one question I get again and again:

“How do I stand out as a junior designer?”

It’s a fair ask. Most early-career designers are trying to get noticed in a noisy market, and when they look around, they see portfolios that look just like theirs. So they wonder—what makes the difference?

Here’s the thing: standing out usually boils down to two things.

1. Visual craft

Mastering the visual side of design can absolutely set you apart. But it’s a long game. It takes time, discipline, and a lot of exposure and feedback to build up great taste and execution. If you’re just starting out, this might take months or even years.

2. Positioning

The much more approachable—and frankly more strategic—way to differentiate yourself is to sharpen your positioning. And that’s what this article is about.

Positioning is about how you show up as a designer: what makes you different, who you’re best suited to help, and why someone should hire you. It’s not about inventing a story—it’s about recognizing the signals in your background, skills, and interests and weaving them into something clear and compelling.

Let’s break it down into three key elements.

1. Your Background

This is the first pillar of positioning, especially for career changers.

Your past experience is incredibly valuable—even if it doesn’t feel obviously relevant to design. The key is how you translate it.

  • If you worked in marketing, you likely already know how to think about users, communication, and impact.

  • If you came from architecture or industrial design, you likely bring a strong systems-thinking mindset and spatial awareness.

  • If your background is in teaching, law, or project management, maybe you have strong communication skills, stakeholder management, or research chops.

No matter the field, ask yourself:

  • What problems did I solve in my past work?

  • What processes did I drive or contribute to?

  • What environments did I thrive in?

Use this to paint a richer picture of yourself—and yes, ideally start with it in your portfolio intro and resume summary.

2. Your Skills (The Sharp Ones)

This is where most people go vague—and where you should go deep.

It’s not enough to say “I’m good at wireframing” or “I enjoy user research.” Everyone says that. What makes your skills stand out is how you use them and to what level of depth.

Here are a few examples of skills worth making part of your positioning if you truly own them:

  • Product thinking – You care about how your design decisions impact the business and user goals, not just how they look.

  • Systems thinking – You’re great at making sense of complexity, spotting patterns, and creating scalable design frameworks.

  • Data visualization – You know how to communicate complex information clearly and engagingly.

  • Deep research skills – You don’t just run a survey—you synthesize data, uncover insights, and drive decisions with evidence.

  • Prototyping – You can bring ideas to life and simulate real interactions that help teams test, align, and move forward quickly. Caution here though: this doesn’t mean you can connect a couple of screens in Figma. This means you can build realistically feeling prototypes of interactions. Dexter Sulit’s case study is a great example and I would recommend him to make prototyping part of his positioning.

All of these are way more meaningful than generic “tool fluency.” Look at your past work—what patterns do you see? Where do you naturally go deeper than others? Is there also something you can source directly from your background?

That’s the second layer of your positioning.

3. Target Role & Industry Fit

Now let’s connect the dots.

Where do your background and skills make the most sense?

If you’re strong in visual design, prototyping, and polish, you might thrive in a B2C environment where delight and interactivity matter most. Those roles are competitive—but if that’s where you shine, you can tailor your work accordingly.

However, most of the market actually sits elsewhere.

Many junior designers I meet are actually better suited for SaaS, enterprise, or B2B roles, where strategy, complexity, and collaboration matter more than pixel-perfect visuals. And that’s great news—because there’s a lot of demand in these spaces.

Here are signs you might fit well in those roles:

  • You’re analytical and enjoy making sense of messy data.

  • You’re curious about business logic and stakeholder needs.

  • You enjoy structuring large systems or redesigning complex flows.

  • You bring a technical background or are comfortable with more abstract products.

Your positioning isn’t just what you say about yourself. It’s a way of matching who you are to the roles where you’re most likely to thrive.

If you’re unsure about industry fit, look at the work you’ve done and how you think. That’ll tell you a lot.

(P.S. I covered this in more depth in this article on why not everyone is meant to work on Duolingo—feel free to check it out.)

Putting It All Together

Positioning is how you answer the question:

“Why you for this job?”

When you figure out your background story, your strongest skills, and your ideal type of role or product, you’ll find yourself with a much clearer and more distinct angle than 90% of junior designers.

From there, you can:

  • Tailor your portfolio and resume to reflect that position.

  • Apply more strategically to roles that truly fit you.

  • Refine as you go—your positioning will evolve the more you put it into action.

And here’s the final tip: if you’re applying for roles that feel like a good fit for your profile but still don’t see traction, your positioning might need sharpening. Go back, refine the way you tell your story, and zoom in further on your strongest differentiators.

The more specific and clear you get, the more magnetic your profile becomes.

Want to stand out?

Start by knowing what makes you stand out. That’s positioning—and it might be your most powerful design skill right now.

💼 More Jobs

👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today we have Pegah’s portfolio on the showcase—and it’s a masterclass in doing the right things well. Her portfolio is refreshingly simple and incredibly effective, because she picked what matters most and did it right.

Let’s take a look at what Pegah did so well!

The Good:

  • Case Study Previews That Work: Pegah nailed the case study cards on her homepage. They take up a generous amount of space, but every bit of it is used meaningfully. The visuals are clear and actually show something—something that many portfolios get wrong by going too small or too vague. The structure is excellent: she includes the product name, a short description of what it does, a quick overview of her role, business impact metrics, and relevant tags like “B2C” or “Agile Feature Enhancement.” The highlight for me? The business impact. For one project, she includes metrics like “85% find issue reporting more efficient” or “80% are more likely to provide feedback.” That’s the kind of information that gives recruiters and hiring managers confidence right from the start. If anything, she could simplify a little by reducing redundancy between role descriptions and subtitles—but even as-is, these cards do exactly what they should: draw you in.

  • Visual Storytelling That Adds Value: Inside her case studies, Pegah continues to impress. Her storytelling shines especially when breaking down complex tasks like user research. She uses structured visuals—like colored bubbles or customer journey flows—that help guide the reader without overwhelming them. It’s not overloaded with flashy interactions or animation, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s clean, clear, and well-composed. One example I particularly appreciated is how she illustrated her in-field research visually, supporting the narrative with evidence of hands-on work. It’s a rare level of thoughtfulness in early-career portfolios.

You know this section, and you also know that no (!) portfolio is perfect. So let’s take a look at what I think Pegah can improve to make an already strong portfolio even stronger.

The Potential:

  • Stronger Positioning: Pegah already has all the ingredients for a strong positioning—relevant experience, a data-driven mindset, and diverse project work across B2C and B2B. But her introduction doesn’t quite bring it all together yet. Right now, it reads a bit more generic than it needs to be. There’s mention of her background as a former client expert and visual merchandiser, but it doesn’t fully connect to her design practice in a way that tells a compelling story. I’d suggest pulling out her strongest elements—perhaps spotlighting her data-driven approach and the environments she’s worked in—and crafting a more specific intro that signals her direction clearly. That could mean something like:
    “Pegah is a UX/UI designer and former visual merchandiser who brings a data-driven, user-first mindset to both B2B and B2C product challenges.”
    Then follow up with a couple of standout skills that set her apart. Positioning is one of the few tools we all have to stand out—and with her foundation, a sharper message could make her profile even more memorable.

  • Improve Text Presentation for Accessibility & Clarity: Pegah’s visual storytelling is excellent, but there are moments where the execution could be even better. In some case studies, like the Yego project, she presents quotes or structured information inside images. While these look nice, they miss out on both accessibility and scalability. Converting these into real text blocks would improve the UX for everyone—and make sure that the design holds up on all screen sizes and resolutions. It’s a small change, but one that adds polish and professionalism.

Pegah’s portfolio is an excellent example of clarity, substance, and strategic storytelling. Her focus on business impact and thoughtful composition stands out in all the right ways. Go check it out and learn how to keep things simple, purposeful, and powerful.

That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

If you’d like to support my efforts on Open Doors further you can buy me a coffee. If you ever got any value from my emails consider it so I can keep this newsletter free and available to everyone out there.

If you need more tailored help on your journey into design here is how I can help you further:

Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian