Apparently it’s pretty hard to pin down, as this job ad at Read/Write Web and posted by OddCast shows. On reading, to me this looks like a marketing/product management role and has very little to do with IA or UX. On the other hand, this role at Getty Images is plum, although very much at the management end of the spectrum and probably fairly divorced from the day-to-day work.
Many people in the IA and UX fields work across both information architecture and user experience/user centered design (ah, the U*D acronym!), despite the skill sets being quite different. My head is definitely more in the IA space than U*D, although I’m perfectly competent at both. In fact, my current role involves me doing work in both spaces.
Is it time for a set of core competencies to be developed and accepted by the worker community (perhaps mediated through organisations such as the IA Institute and Usability Professionals) for information architecture and user experience workers? I’d suggest, as someone married to an HR worker who knows more than a little about competencies (and I’m regaled daily with issues along these lines) that such a thing wouldn’t go astray.
Note, however that I say core competencies. By no means am I suggesting that a definitive and limiting set be the output, just a set of things that a competent IA or UX worker should be able to do. Beside those, perhaps a set of experience-based refinements expanding on just what each competency means for a junior, senior or management role. This isn’t dissimilar to efforts produced in many other areas of expertise.
Your thoughts?
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