Continuing Education

When I first got notified of the layoffs last September, the first thing I did was sign up for all the classes I had been dragging my feet on for one reason or another. (Usually because work was busy and work-life balance is massively important to me.) At the time it didn’t occur to me to document my progress with my classes, not outside of telling my LinkedIn (LI) network about my certification gains.

I started with Youtube University and Mizko to convert from Sketch to Figma. Then I signed up for Interaction Design Foundation, Design Systems University, TechFleet, and CodeAcademy. In the last few months, I’ve completed 7 certifications and am working on several more. I’ve connected with hundreds of new people on LI and ADPList, learning from top mentors in the product and user experience space, and aim to continue my journey even while I take on freelance contracts.

My newest class, thanks to the recommendation of a design systems colleague on LI, will be Memorisely’s Design Systems Bootcamp where I am hoping to learn scalable enterprise level design systems. With that said, what are my goals for the class in a tangible way?

I would like to graduate the class knowing how to:

• Create and organize a design system that could be scaled to enterprise levels from scratch (including token and variable usage, and documentation like Storybook)

• Use the class to develop the system for Project Quill

• Create a sub brand of the system to test it’s scaling ability

I’ll consider it a win if I can do those things upon graduation, and am excited to share that process here when I begin.

Some other classes I am currently taking are:

• Interaction Design Foundation’s Dynamic User Experience: Design and Usability

• Interaction Design Foundation’s Conducting Usability Testing

• Interaction Design Foundation’s Interaction Design for Usability

• CodeAcademy’s Learn Javascript

I currently still have some availability for short term contract work. Please reach out at laineyhollock@gmail.com if you would like to chat with me about this that or any other thing!