Accreditations, certifications, and meaningful conversations
By: Juan Madrigal
I have always been interested and believed in continuing my education, my skills, and my knowledge as a designer. I am always reading the articles and books on design, entrepreneurship, and technology.
I want to share my thoughts, and some thoughts from various leaders in UX about Accreditations, Licenses and Certifications. I’ll elaborate mostly on my personal path, learning, and Licenses or Accreditations below.
My path, one of many…
I’ll start with the path to where I’m at now. Hint: Work in progress…
I studied Graphic Design in Colombia and although I considered it being a decent program, it lacked everything digital in an almost scandalous way, I’m talking about 90’s Print Design in Colombia; fully analogue and it felt like a craft — although I still like the analogue side of design, I loved typesetting text in Letraset and typography is still one of my motivators.
I could say I was lucky enough to have started using versions 1.0 and/or 2.0 of all of the design software and to experienced their evolution.
The lack of digital design in my education is why in the following years after earning my BA in Graphic Design in the late 90’s, I started to feel a strong interest in web design and my already existent curiosity for technology grew bigger. I wasn’t interested in coding but decided to learn a little bit about HTML and started designing sites in Dreamweaver (when it was part of Macromedia): it always felt like being self-taught was the only way to go in Colombia where courses were rare, really expensive or very hard to find, especially courses that were more about design than coding. I took a course and learned mostly by myself.
I decided to move to US and then Canada in 2001 and started designing more and more for digital outputs until I completely transitioned into a digital designer — not a web designer, around 2010. This went hand-in-hand as my career was evolving from Senior Graphic Designer to Design Director. I was designing web apps, sites, mobile apps, digital advertising, digital marketing pieces, and also doing User Experience Design. All those years where I gained knowledge by working close to very talented people, asking them, reading, going to conferences and some short courses, I always felt that I had some gaps that I tried to fill by doing more short courses and being self-taught but some of those gaps were never fully covered, and they might never will.
The problem with short courses is that they only cover a very superficial aspect of a UX area, and going back to school was not really the best option for many reasons and I started thinking about a real certificate, either online or in-person as they way to get me closer to where I wanted to be. Nielsen Norman Group UX Certificate was always on my mind but it was expensive and hard to really know if it was worth it or not. Sometimes I thought why should I even bother? Yes, of course, it would be helpful but a certificate doesn’t make me an expert overnight.
Last year, I took the matter more seriously after my last 2 employers didn’t facilitate or helped me reach those goals. But this time I was really lucky when my present employer did help me reach that goal, so this year I took the Nielsen Norman Group UX Certificate. I’m now UX Certified with an Interaction Design Specialty from NN/g, and I’m also taking courses from the Interaction Design Foundation, so far I have a certificate in Conducting Usability Testing and I’m about to complete other ones; I won’t stop there.
Certificates are good but they don’t define you, you define them by other things you have done and learned in your career.
The content of these certificates has helped me fill some of those gaps, implement new methodologies, be more critical about the discipline inside and outside of the company I work for, gain more confidence, and last but not least, have a tangible and straightforward way to demonstrate that I am a UX designer. Why demonstrate I’m a UX designer? Well, the gaps I filled were not huge and I did gain new knowledge, but it was always hard to be taken seriously by other UX designers that study at a university or are certified by any of the institutions that grant a valid certificate, and this is because designers are over-protectors of their knowledge and/or specialty area, it was also hard to convince Design Managers. This only hurts our domain and as Jose Coronado questions in his article “Are design teams supporting the development of new UX talent?”.
This also touches an aspect that is more relevant today than ever, in “You don’t need to know everything about UX” by Fabricio Teixeira, and this means as a UX designer you can have a stronger profile in one or some disciplines of UX but not all.
These two points, supporting the development of UX new talent and why you don’t need to know everything about UX, combined with a different approach on responsibilities more than design roles, are fundamental for UX to thrive and evolve.
Learning
As basically any profession or job, you have to keep learning new things, improving and re-evaluating what you know, practicing, keeping up to date with trends and/or technologies: this only if you want to grow in your field and not suffer all the time from the “Imposter Syndrome”, and one of the best ways to do so is to “Get into the habit of regularly asking yourself and others, “What can I do to be better at my job?” (And then really listen to the answers.)” as Leslie Chicoine stated in Guy Ligertwood’s article:
What can you do better? Learn; you need to learn and train hard and soft skills. Learning can be done in many ways and I have found that Jessica Ivins’ “The Three Levels of Learning UX Design” it’s a very solid and clear path.
There’s an interesting perspective by Dan Maccarone and Sarah Doody on how today’s UX Learning is broken, which is mostly a problem of honesty from the designers part. As I mentioned before, you can’t call or self-proclaim yourself a UX Designer after a week-long online course and without any previous related background.
The main question
How can others know and understand in a tangible way that you have learned a skill? You need a certificate unless you graduated from a UX related program. A certificate from a reputable institution is a valid document showing that you have learned skills and you were tested and passed several exams, this is the opposite of stating that you have read many articles and books on a subject matter, and it is also the opposite from doing a short and basic online UX course and saying that you are a UX designer.
Your word alone is not credible enough and that’s understandable, although just a certificate doesn’t certify that you fully master a skill. You can also show your work but this alone doesn’t work most of the times, and this is the same as just pretending that because you went to certain school or did a certain certificate makes you an expert. To be a good UX Designer you need a combination of the following:
- Knowledge (quality of that knowledge)
- Hard and soft skills
- Experience
- Dedication and practice
- Analytical and creative thinking
- A Certificate or similar that backs how you attained that knowledge
- Community involvement
- And many others…
Again, what I’m stating here is that gaining a certificate is a very useful way to show you have been serious about the way you learn and with what you do, and you have one more way to show it; this is not the ultimate truth but it’s the path I have experienced and I have seen others going through that path, and I guess if you completed a UX program, a certificate might not be that important or relevant for you, unless there’s an area you want to learn more or specialize in.
License, Certification or accreditation?
This has been a long conversation for many fields that are not Licensed or Accredited: Licenses or Accreditations are a must for some professions for obvious reasons and they are or might be for other professions for different reasons. To have a license to operate is highly restrictive for UX Design but accreditations are a good way for businesses to trust a professional that uses industry standards and knows best practices amongst others, and to understand her/his level of involvement within the industry. To be accredited by a new organization that works as a transversal accreditation and non-for-profit body like the IxDA will be an advantage for those who are accredited and soon enough, most of those who are not accredited will be. This could raise the quality of the work done in the UX Design field and could finally settle UX Design a serious well-established profession (not that is not…). Also, having studied a UX program at university should not be a pre/requisite to be accredited (this is a long conversation and I wont develop more on this).
The conversation to be Licensed or Accredited has been growing in the UX field and Mike Monteiro, without wanting to impose his thoughts, raised many questions that we should listen to and start building upon.
Within the design and UX fields, these are some examples:
The Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and the Association of Registered Graphic Designers (Ontario, Canada), they both issue a Certification which is more like an accreditation without any ISO standards.
The advantage of these is that you don’t have to do it in order to work as a Graphic Designer in Canada, but being certified by the GDC or the RGD gives you an advantage and a recognition, is it unfair to have that advantage? — I don’t think so, it’s up to you.
The User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) membership “is an international association devoted to assisting new and established professionals in the user experience disciplines”, so more than an accreditation body, the UXPA is an association that helps its members “hone your skills and deepen your involvement in the UX community”. Helpful? — Yes, and it’s your choice but it doesn’t give you a formal accreditation or certification.
The Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) is an independent nonprofit initiative that “democratize learning by providing top-notch curricular materials, and we aim to strike the perfect balance between academic rigor and practical relevance”. The IDF issues certificates for their UX Design courses and they have a very high-quality content material. You get a certificate for being a member but that doesn’t actually certify your level of experience.
Human Factors International has certifications mainly in HCI and other UX areas and they offer very high-quality courses but is not an association.
Nielsen Norman Group also offers high-quality courses and issue certificates for different levels and areas of UX. Nielsen Norman Group is one of the most renowned and respected UX organizations and although they are not an accreditation body, it is probably close to being one but they are a for-profit and a consulting company and this is a conflict of interests for the purpose of accrediting professionals.
Jared M. Spool is a UX authority that has been vocal about certifications, but again, I say we should call them accreditations and I disagree that organizations will start only hiring certified UX designers; it all the depends on what kind of organizations are we talking about.
I consider these are probably the most relevant to this conversation, there are more organizations that issue certificates out there. In the meantime, although we don’t have an organization that accredits our field, certificates are the closest we can get.
“Amateur hour is over.”
— Mike Monteiro
The original article appears in UX Collective and it was written by Juan Madrigal, you can find the original article here.
