When I started, I did not have a portfolio that made people stop.

I did not have years of work experience on a CV. I did not have the right certifications or the most impressive job titles. What I had was community work. Events I had organised. Spaces I had held. Conversations I had started and kept going. People who had shown up because I had built something they wanted to be part of.

And that, not the resume, not the credentials, was what gave me my first real credibility in the industry.

The rooms I got into at the beginning of my career were not rooms I qualified for on paper. There were rooms where someone had seen what I was building and decided I was worth a conversation. The trust that opened those doors was not earned through a degree or a job title. It was earned through the community I had consistently shown up for before anyone was watching.

I did not have a word for it then. Now I do.

Community is the new CV.

Not because credentials do not matter. They still do, in their place. But because in a world where degrees are losing their status as gatekeepers, where AI is flattening the value of generic skills, and where the most important rooms are increasingly entered through relationships and not applications, the communities you build and belong to have become the most powerful proof of who you are professionally.

This edition is about that shift. Why is it happening? What does it look like? And what does it mean for everyone building something right now?

— Prashant

The drop in US job postings requiring a four-year degree between 2019 and 2025, according to research from Lightcast published in 2026. In the same period, skills-based hiring crossed from trend to standard practice at a growing number of employers, with IBM, Delta Air Lines, Bank of America, and the US federal government all removing degree mandates for large categories of roles.

Only 37% of employers still see traditional credentials, degrees, job titles, and bullet-point histories as reliable signals of talent. Over 40% are actively moving away from resume-first hiring.

The credential era is not ending dramatically. It is dissolving quietly. And something is filling the space it leaves behind.

Friends of Figma is not a job board. It has no formal placement programme. It does not promise anyone a career outcome.

And yet, across dozens of cities globally, including Hyderabad, where the local chapter has become one of the most active design communities in South India, it has quietly become one of the most powerful career launchpads in the design industry.

Here is the mechanism.

When a designer joins a Friends of Figma chapter, they enter a room, physical or digital, where the standard currency is not credentials. It is a contribution. The person who facilitates a session, who asks the sharpest question, who organises the next event, who shows up consistently and generously, that person becomes visible in a way that a CV cannot manufacture. They are seen doing the work, not claiming they can do it.

The Hyderabad chapter has been a laboratory for this principle. Events like The Unfiltered Design, a house event built around honest, unguarded conversation about design and creativity, create the conditions where real professional identity is formed. Not the performed identity of a portfolio review, but the earned identity of someone who builds spaces worth showing up to.

The designers who have moved into senior roles, freelance careers, and new opportunities through the Friends of Figma ecosystem rarely cite a specific referral or a formal recommendation. They cite visibility. Being in the room. Being the person who brought people together. Being known for something beyond their job title.

The transferable principle: your community is your most public proof of work. Every event you run demonstrates project management. Every space you hold demonstrates leadership. Every conversation you facilitate demonstrates communication and empathy at a level no interview can assess. The question is not whether this work has career value. It is whether you are making it visible enough for the right people to see it.

The job board is not dead. But it is no longer where the best hires come from.

A quiet but significant shift is happening in how forward-thinking companies find talent, and it runs directly through community infrastructure.

Only about 37% of employers still see traditional credentials as reliable signals of talent, and over 40% are actively ditching resume-first hiring. The companies leading this shift are not replacing CVs with nothing. They are replacing them with community proof, evidence of contribution, consistency, and capability that only emerges when someone has genuinely participated in a professional community over time.

The mechanism works in three ways.

First, communities surface talent that job boards cannot find. The designer who has been running workshops, writing about their process, and showing up at every local design event is visible to anyone paying attention to that community, long before they update their LinkedIn. The best community-aware hiring managers are not waiting for applications. They are watching communities and making moves before a vacancy is even posted.

Second, community participation is a proxy for culture fit in a way that interviews cannot replicate. A candidate who has been an active, generous contributor to a professional community has already demonstrated how they behave in a collaborative, peer-driven environment. That is the signal every hiring manager wants and almost never gets from a one-hour conversation.

Third, community-sourced hires retain at significantly higher rates. When someone joins an organisation through a community they trust, their sense of belonging does not start on day one at the company. It existed before. That head start on belonging is one of the most underrated factors in early retention.

45.45% open rate. 13.33% click rate. 33 active subscribers.

The open rate climbed from 36% in Edition 03 to 45.45% in Edition 04. That is the direction I want. The content is landing harder with the people who are here. The click rate at 13.33% remains strong; these are not passive readers. They are engaged ones.

33 active subscribers is a small number. It is also an honest one. Every person in that number chose to be here and is showing up. That is the foundation. The next phase of growth, which starts with this edition, is about making ICC Notes easy and compelling to share. If you are reading this and it changed how you think about something, forward it to one person who needs to read it. That single act, multiplied across 33 readers, is how this grows.

The central hub of the ICC ecosystem, the place where everything connects, has a launch date. 31st May 2026. The initial draft with all phases is complete. It is the central nervous system of everything being built here: the Notes, the Podcast, the Brief, the communities, the events, and the work still taking shape.

If you want early access before it opens publicly, reply to this edition. No forms. No funnels. A direct conversation with the people I trust most.

The biggest community moment of the year for designers in Hyderabad is on track. Agenda finalised. Partnerships confirmed. Marketing starting this week. And this year, something new: SAGE (Strategic Advisory Ground for the Ecosystem), where industry leaders are helping shape the initiatives and the experience to make this a genuine, future-ready industry moment. Not just a watch party. A statement about where the design community in India is heading.

Still looking for venue and F&B support. If you or someone you know can help, reach out directly at [email protected]

The rooms I got into at the beginning of my career were not rooms I qualified for on paper.

There were rooms where the community vouched for me before I could vouch for myself.

That is still the most powerful career move available to anyone building something right now.

Not the resume. Not the certification. Not the LinkedIn headline.

The community that knows what you are actually made of, and says so, in the right rooms, at the right time.

Build that. Everything else follows.