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Skills that raise your pay

• User research

  Interviewing users, running usability tests, reading data. Research-heavy designers are paid more and are harder to replace with AI tools.

• Accessibility

  Designing for screen readers and people with disabilities. Legally required for much public-sector work in Canada.

• Front-end code

  HTML, CSS and basic JavaScript. Designers who can prototype in code are rare.

• Design systems

  Building the reusable component libraries big companies run on. A senior specialty.