From Fashion Designer to UX Designer

Hear from Designer Track student, Noëlle, on her job search experience. She enrolled in our program after working as a fashion designer for several years and graduated from Parsons School of Design. As she was finishing the Designer Track program, Noëlle secured an awesome job in Paris. Read her story below!

I am proud to say today that I will be starting a new job as a UX Designer at a Paris consulting agency, WeDigitalGarden, starting September 2017. As easy as those words are to type out, my journey to get there was a long and nerve-wracking one.

I enrolled in Bloc’s Designer track in February 2017, taking a huge leap of faith and leaving behind a career in fashion design as well as a graphic design job offer at a prominent childrenswear company in NYC, where I still lived at the time. After years of frustration and a growing interest in digital and communication design, I decided to follow my heart and pursue a UX/UI career while also returning to my home country which I had grown to miss tremendously.

Though my Bloc program was not scheduled to end until the summer of 2017, I started updating my LinkedIn and researching jobs as early as April, only three months into the course. I even snagged a couple skype and telephone interviews at that time (all disastrous). Though those early job prospects failed, they were a learning experience and helped my interviewing skills in a new field using a new language. I learned what to show and say to recruiters and hiring managers, for example, I emphasized my available work date and learned skills rather than highlighted the fact I was still a student which would risk recruiters overlooking me. While this was good practice when making initial contact, the more important thing I learned was how to get my profile noticed in the first place.

The following two things were probably the most impactful and much simpler than you’d think. In those early stages and on my mentor’s suggestion, I changed my LinkedIn title to “UX/UI Designer — currently seeking new opportunities”, choosing a title based on the type of job I was hoping to get and emphasizing my availability to interview which resulted in my profile becoming more visible in recruiters’ search results and consequently led to more connection requests and inMail messages as I was clearly labeled as available to interview.

In the months following, I made sure to regularly edit my profile to keep it up to date. This was the second crucial thing I did as I noticed that even the most minor changes (like correcting a typo in my description bio) meant my profile shot to the top of recruiter search results, once again, as it became considered “active”. It felt like having LinkedIn premium for free!

Aside from this, I did very little else until I was ready to start seriously job searching in the summer with a goal of a September start date. By the time summer came, however, I had already been in touch with several potential employers (who had contacted me first) and I ultimately ended up finding and accepting a job before any of my own job applications fully came through.

The interview process for the job I ultimately accepted happened really fast. I had a brief phone interview after a few LinkedIn messages with a recruiter at WeDigitalGarden before being invited to come in for an in-person interview. Interestingly, I was interviewing for a contract job for one of their clients but what I didn’t realize was that they also had an in-house role they were looking to fill and thought I might be a good fit. I ended up meeting with not one, but three people over the course of close to two hours, interviewing both in French and English. It didn’t feel so much like an interview as it did a genuine exchange about my background, work experience, transition into UX/ UI from fashion and personal likes/dislikes in terms of design, work environment and habits, and general areas of interest (in my case: arts, education, health & wellness etc.). Some of the questions I was asked were:

• Explain the similarities and differences that you noticed between fashion design and UX/UI design.
• Describe your understanding of hierarchy in design and give examples of how you’ve used it, or how it’s been useful to you in the past. (I brought up this Oscar mishap from last February as part of my answer).
• Why did you choose to transition careers?

A week later I was asked for a follow-up interview with the head of HR and the week after, I got the offer! It all happened really fast.

Today, even after having removed the “actively seeking” status from my LinkedIn profile, I still receive the occasional inMail as well as responses to some of those job applications to whom I now politely turn down.