What young Ukrainian designers want: ₴15k+ salary and a creative job

Creative Practice educational platform conducted a survey among future Ukrainian designers to find out about their job expectations and hopes. In addition, analysts surveyed the employers and compared how far the market can justify them. The results were shared with AIN.UA.

Young designer profile

For the most part, the designer’s career is of interest to women. Only 28.5% of those who indicated their sex are men. Most of respondents are aged between 21-25 (34.5%) and 26-30 (26.1%). However, it should be noted that many people aged 31-35 are also thinking of starting a career in design, often by changing their current occupation (almost 20%).

The largest share of future designers is Kyivites and residents of Kyiv region (more than 50% of respondents). The second city in terms of the number of applications is Lviv (11.2%) followed by Kharkiv (5.2%).

Popular design directions

Most future designers are keen to study web design and UX/UI design (56.7% each), and graphic design (56.1%).

When answering questions about companies they would want to work for, young designers focus on creative agencies (62.7%) and design studios (58.5%). Web studios and web production came third with (46.1%).

Career expectations

Students highlighted interesting tasks, professional competence of the team and friendly staff as the key factors of job search.

As far as the employment process is concerned, young professionals are ready to have a probation period with a majority of respondents (36.4%) believing that it should last one month. Employers are predominantly inclined to assess new team members for a longer period with most of them (33.3%) believing that the three-month probation period is more appropriate.

When employing young professionals, most creative companies (61.1%) consider it appropriate to offer a test task, although 36.1% of employers believe that there is no need to complete the task if a young professional has own portfolio.

Salary expectations

Salary expectations of young designers, students and employers are substantially different.

The majority of respondents (35.9%) want to get at least 15,000 UAH per month as a junior designer. Fewer respondents (32.5%) estimate the desired level of remuneration for this title to range from 10,000 UAH to 15,000 UAH a month.

At the same time, over half of the companies (57.1%) believe that 7,500 UAH to 10,000 UAH is a fair monthly remuneration, and fewer of employers-respondents (28.6%) are ready to pay somewhere between 10,000 UAH to 15,000 UAH per month.

The category of respondents younger than 20 years old is ready to work for the smallest remuneration. Expectations increase with age. The most demanding from the point of view of salary are respondents aged 36 to 40 and aged 41 to 50.

Speaking in terms of geography, future designers from Kyiv and the region have the highest salary expectations. They are followed by Vinnytsia. Kharkiv and Lviv are competing for third place.

Survey details

The survey was conducted in May of this year with 330 respondents (students) from all over Ukraine.

Employers — 36 representatives of the creative industry (reps of Aimbulance, BBDO Ukraine, deco.agency, Galagan, GRAPE, Kiselev, POSTMEN, POPEL Agency, Tabasco Creative Agency, Tubik Studio, Vintage, UAMASTER, prominent Ukrainian designers — Dmytro Bulanov, Yurko Hutsulyak, Dmytro Klishchyk, Vika Lopukhina, Olha Protasova, Nataliya Tachynska, and others).