Here is a story about get a job in UX
This is a personal tale I’ve read from UX article. This story explains a lot about UX careers and journeys, which I think it is interesting and useful for UX students and would like to share with you.
Let’s just call this person as “N”, short for “Newbie”. Yes, we all newbies in UX, although we learn a lot of knowledge from school, when you truly experience from career path after you graduate, you will find it still has a lot of differences eventually.
Before N start to find a UX job, he got a bunch emails from UX psychologist guide and asked him a few questions all the time “ how do I start a career in UX with no experience or specific design education, or how do I transfer to UX from a different career, or how do I ply my psychology PhD/Master into UX?
Before answer this, let me introduce N for a bit, he has a few thousand twitter followers which he has built up over 2 years, nothing like design leaders with hundreds of thousands. He is not a startup founder, nor has he really worked on high-profile products. He is squarely in the “average person” slow and steady career path.
He did HTML, design and computer nerd hardware stuff for the next few years through middle and high school. He knew everything bout designing for Netscape, and eventnuall IE1.0 One-point-oh.
In 1998, he dropped out of high school after 11th grade to work at a web design agency, right at the height of dot-com craze 1.0, They built websites for everything imaginable. He worked with a single programmer as the front end designer. JavaScript stuff wasn’t popular yet at that time.
Not a very fancy phase from him, UX wasn’t a “thing” like it was now. A lot of people look back at that era and realize they were doing a primitive form of UX design. A lot of smart people were already doing research, IA,testing-real human centered design that became UX.
In about 2005, he started working alone as a consultant doing”UX” and design for whatever clients I could find. This went on until about 2010, it was a slow fade into and out of trend. He worked on every type of project imaginable, and really started to focus on UX as the primary goal. designing end-to-end for people and even taking over their business strategy for the web with the user-centered, holistic approach in mind. He think this is just how his brain works as a secret novelist. Everything is a story, a process, and end to end journey. By the end of this run, UX was a thing, the hottest job title around, and as I re-entered the ranks of the gainfully employed, he was now a UX designer. He’d settle for nothing less.
That’s it, he had no silver bullet to getting in UX. Just a lifetime of regular lead bullets. He didn’t go to graduate school for HCI or a an MBA in design strategy, he didn’t win a gameshow like American Idol and land in a cinderella job as a UX debutante.
In the end, he would like to share one thing he truly know, is that you need to toss out “work smarter, not harder” of your vocabulary. Get rid of it. Ignore it. The real axiom you need to focus on is: work hard in smart ways, have a relentless and punishing work ethic, make every step you take slightly more vertical than the last as you scale the mountain, and above everything else, have your personal “why” you do this.
