Figma

Figma is where product design work happens, gets reviewed, and is handed to engineers. Fluency is table stakes in design hiring — expected, checked quickly, and almost never the reason anyone is hired.

What the work consists of

Less drawing than most people expect. Building components so a change propagates instead of being repeated forty times, naming layers so a colleague can navigate the file, and maintaining the states — loading, empty, error, too-long-name — that make a design implementable rather than aspirational.

What employers screen for

Almost nothing about the tool. It is the weakest signal on a portfolio because it is the easiest thing to acquire and the easiest to verify in five minutes. What actually gets read is whether another designer could pick up your file and continue: components, sensible structure, states that exist.

• Components and variants, used to reduce work rather than to look organised
• Auto-layout, because a design that does not respond is a picture of a design
• Handover: specs an engineer can build from without a meeting

The honest limit

Three or four weeks to competent. Treating the tool as the skill is the most common mistake among people entering design, and it is visible in a portfolio review immediately — the files are immaculate and the thinking is absent. The thinking is in interaction design and user research, which take considerably longer.