An actor grows old and keep on acting. A filmmaker gathers experience and keep making movies. A singer keeps singing and a composer keeps composing no matter how much experience they get. The more experience you get the better you are at your work. On the other hand, the corporate world has this tendency to turn anyone with experience into a clerk.
If you are an experienced designer, you are no longer designing; you are supervising other designers. At a theoretical level, you are guiding the design aspect but in reality, you end up doing a lot of clerical things and less and less design related activities. The same happens to people from other profiles as well. An experienced programmer is not programming but doing documentation.
By trade, I was taught design software like PhotoShop, Corel Draw, and Flash but now I'm mostly using Microsoft office products like MS Word, PowerPoint, excel.
It is important for organizations to utilize the most experienced people in a better way. They need to see that what they are doing doesn't hamper their creativity. After a while just looking at the work done by other commenting on it, they get a little out of practice and start losing their ability to create something themselves. Suggest me in what ways the contribution of the senior designers be made more useful.
Dhwanit Saxena's comments
I agreed with this role conversion practice. As per my experience, in our IT sector specially in software developement field, companies treats us as a raw product. And by the time raw products (we) are either consumed or shaped into a frame (TL, PL, bla bla bla) which can give meaningful & effective shapes to others in a single instance. These others are no one else but r our colleagues having less experience.
I never have had dreams of next 5-10 years, but will appreciate such profiles. Its actaully the place where u can play with a typical combination of ur management plus technical skills.
Last but not least if creativity is in nature and one loves his profession then such conversion practices would definatly make him restless. And if one targets conversions as a profession then dreaming of, will make him restless.
