In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, designing meaningful career paths for design professionals presents a unique challenge. At RBC Digital, we recognized that traditional career planning approaches weren’t sufficient to prepare our designers for the uncertain future of our industry. This article explores how we leveraged strategic foresight techniques—particularly backcasting—to develop a robust career path program that empowers our design team to thrive in various possible futures.
The Challenge: Future-Proofing Design Careers
When we set out to rebuild our career development framework, we faced several critical questions:
- How will the role of designers evolve over the next 5-10 years?
- What new skills and competencies will become essential as technology and user expectations change?
- How can we create a program flexible enough to adapt to emerging trends while providing clear advancement opportunities?
- What structures will best support both individual growth and organizational needs?
Rather than making incremental improvements to our existing framework, we decided to take a step back and employ strategic foresight methodologies to envision multiple possible futures for the design industry.
Strategic Foresight: Looking Beyond Traditional Planning
Strategic foresight differs from traditional planning in that it doesn’t attempt to predict a single future. Instead, it explores multiple plausible scenarios to help organizations prepare for various possibilities. For our career path program, this approach offered several advantages:
- It acknowledged the uncertainty inherent in long-term planning
- It forced us to challenge our assumptions about design careers
- It helped identify potential disruptors that might reshape design roles
- It created a more resilient framework that could adapt to different future states
Backcasting: Starting with the Future in Mind
The cornerstone of our approach was backcasting—a foresight technique that begins by defining desired future states and then works backward to identify the steps needed to connect those futures to the present. Unlike forecasting, which extrapolates current trends forward, backcasting starts with envisioning success and maps the path to achieve it.
Our process involved several key phases:
Phase 1: Future Scenario Development
We began by assembling a diverse team of design leaders, individual contributors, HR partners, and external industry experts. Through a series of structured workshops, we developed four distinct scenarios for the future of design at RBC:
- Scenario 1: The Specialist Renaissance – A future where deep expertise in niche design disciplines becomes highly valued
- Scenario 2: The Generalist Advantage – A future emphasizing versatile designers who can work across disciplines and technologies
- Scenario 3: The Embedded Strategist – A future where designers become central to business strategy and organizational decision-making
- Scenario 4: The Augmented Designer – A future where AI and automation transform the designer’s role into one of curation and oversight
For each scenario, we detailed the skills, knowledge, mindsets, and experiences that would be most valuable for designers.
Phase 2: Identifying Common Elements
After developing these scenarios, we analyzed them to identify common elements that appeared across multiple futures. These became the foundation of our career path program:
- Adaptive Learning – The ability to continuously acquire new skills and knowledge
- Systems Thinking – Understanding complex relationships between design decisions and broader contexts
- Collaboration Across Disciplines – Working effectively with diverse teams and stakeholders
- Business Acumen – Connecting design decisions to organizational objectives and outcomes
- Ethical Design Practice – Ensuring responsible approaches to user data, accessibility, and inclusion
Phase 3: Backcasting to the Present
With our future scenarios defined, we worked backward to identify the pathways and milestones that would lead from our current state to these desired futures. This involved:
- Mapping existing design roles to future-oriented competencies
- Identifying gaps in our current development offerings
- Creating progressive learning journeys for different career stages
- Defining success metrics that would indicate progress toward our desired futures
The Career Path Program Framework
The result of our strategic foresight work was a multidimensional career path program built around three key components:
1. Career Tracks with Flexibility
Rather than creating a rigid ladder of job titles, we developed flexible career tracks that accommodate various growth patterns. Each track includes:
- Core competencies and expected proficiencies
- Optional specializations that allow for personalization
- Clear distinctions between levels while allowing for non-linear advancement
- Cross-track mobility options to support career pivots
2. Learning Journeys
To support progression along these tracks, we created structured learning journeys that combine:
- Formal training programs for essential skills
- Mentorship relationships with senior designers
- Project-based learning opportunities
- External education funding for specialized knowledge
- Peer learning communities focused on emerging trends
3. Future-Sensing Mechanisms
Recognizing that our industry will continue to evolve, we built mechanisms to regularly reassess and update the program:
- Quarterly trend analysis sessions with the design leadership team
- Annual review of career paths against emerging industry developments
- Ongoing collection of feedback from designers at all levels
- Regular engagement with external design communities and thought leaders
Implementation and Early Results
Implementing this program required significant organizational change management. We phased the rollout over 18 months, beginning with:
- Leadership alignment sessions to ensure consistent understanding and support
- Manager training on using the new framework for development conversations
- Designer workshops to introduce the program and begin personal planning
- Integration with performance management and promotion processes
Now, two years into implementation, we’re seeing promising results:
- 93% of designers report clearer understanding of growth opportunities
- Retention rates among mid-senior designers have improved by 18%
- Internal mobility between design disciplines has increased by 27%
- Designers are proactively engaging in more future-oriented skill development
Lessons Learned
This journey has taught us valuable lessons about building effective career development programs:
- Embrace uncertainty – Rather than pretending to know exactly what the future holds, acknowledge multiple possibilities
- Balance structure and flexibility – Provide clear paths while allowing for personalization and adaptation
- Include diverse perspectives – Involve people at different career stages and with different backgrounds in program development
- Connect individual growth to organizational needs – Ensure that career development serves both personal and business objectives
- Build in mechanisms for evolution – Create processes to regularly reassess and update the program
Conclusion: The Future of Design Careers
By applying strategic foresight techniques to career path development, we’ve created a program that does more than document current roles—it actively prepares our design team for a range of possible futures. This approach has transformed how designers at RBC think about their careers, shifting from reactive skill-building to proactive career ownership.
As the design industry continues to evolve, we’ll continue refining our approach. The true measure of success won’t be how accurately we predicted specific trends, but how well we’ve equipped our designers to thrive regardless of which future emerges.
For organizations looking to build more resilient career development programs, strategic foresight offers a powerful alternative to traditional approaches. By starting with possible futures and working backward, we can create frameworks that remain relevant even as our industry transforms in ways we can’t yet imagine.
