So… you want a career in user experience (UX) design?
Editor’s Note: Melanie was a user research co-op student at the Ontario Digital Service (ODS) completing a Master of Information at the University of Toronto. In her free time, Melanie enjoys hiking in forests, watching British television for the dry wit, and learning the languages of the places she travels to.
Image source: https://twitter.com/wearedesignx?lang=en
In August I attended the first-ever Ladders Conference organized by DesignX at OCAD University.
The event brought together design leaders from both the private and public sectors.
The conference, along with my co-op and volunteer experience, has helped me answer three key questions that I, and many junior designers, have when navigating our careers:
- What do employers look for in a junior designer?
- What is a personal brand, and how do I get one?
- How do I manage my career?
1. What employers look for in a junior designer
As someone who’s new to the field of user experience (UX) design, I occasionally browse job postings to see the kinds of designers employers are hiring.
I often find descriptions of entry-level positions asking for people with expertise in multiple areas, from coding, to graphic design and UX research. This person is known as the UX unicorn.
UX unicorns are a myth
Like many veteran designers, the speakers at the Ladders conference, debunked its existence.
As it turns out, many employers aren’t looking for unicorns in their junior or senior designers. Employers want designers who:
- can thrive in their company’s team environment
- have the drive to develop their skills, and
- will improve over time
So what skills are employers looking for?
Make sure you have the hard skills required to get the job done. These skills will vary depending on your specific role.
For me, as a user researcher at the Ontario Digital Service, the most important thing is knowing what questions to ask, and how to ask them, using the appropriate research methods.
However, soft skills are equally important. Senior designers at the Ladders Conference highlight 3 important soft skills:
- communication
- empathy
- collaboration
These skills are used in everything from facilitating user testing sessions, to working with your product teams. They will also be invaluable should you want to progress into leadership roles.
Don’t spend a lot of time learning every single research and design tool out there. They are often interchangeable. As one of my user experience design colleagues, at the Ontario Digital Service, once said, “Tool agnosticism is rad!”
2. Developing your personal brand
What is a personal brand?
A personal brand defines your professional value and career goals. It helps you:
- tell a compelling story or narrative about yourself
- highlight your value to potential employers
- identify personal benchmarks for how you want to develop professionally
For example, my personal brand strengthens how I present myself as a user researcher because I’m able to communicate that I’m an anthropologist with skills in ethnographic and qualitative research.
As David Han, Director of Experience Design at Publicis, said in his conference talk, “You need to build you up as an individual.”
How to create a portfolio to support your personal brand
Showcase what you’re really good at
Instead of aiming to be a UX unicorn, identify your strengths and learn how to elevate them.
You want to highlight the unique skills you bring to the team. Keep in mind, while being an expert in every area is not necessary, you do want to have a broad understanding of the end-to-end design process. This will allow you to better communicate with the different kinds of team members you’ll be collaborating with, like developers and product managers.
Target your portfolio to the jobs you want
As a designer, it’s essential to have a portfolio that not only looks good, but also:
- demonstrates your design process and reasoning behind your decisions
- reflects your personal brand by providing examples of how you stand out as an individual
Research the skills and experiences valued by employers that you’re interested in working with. Understand their organizational values and mission and who’s involved in the hiring process.
Then be strategic in the projects you present in your portfolio, so that it creates a unified, professional narrative, which communicates why you’re the right person for the role.
As for actually creating a portfolio, there are lots of helpful resources and examples on the web, including this one on how to build your portfolio. There is no right or wrong way to create one, but remember to let your personality shine through.
Once you feel like your portfolio’s good to go, it’s time to look for a job! I’ve provided some advice in the following section.
3. Managing your career
Apply to jobs strategically
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the wide range of titles for similar user experience (UX) jobs. Then I start to wonder whether I should pick up more skills to increase my chances of getting hired. It’s in moments, like these, where my personal brand has helped me to stay focused on my career plan.
Instead of trying to make yourself fit into every job posting you come across, apply for jobs that align with your personal brand.
Highlight what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing, and where you would like to further develop your skills or expertise. It’s your opportunity to apply for jobs that are beneficial to your personal and professional well-being.
This will give you and your employer common ground to define your professional value and plan ahead for career growth opportunities.
Be proactive
Once you’ve landed your gig, the work isn’t over.
Even though I’m still in the beginning stages of navigating my career, I constantly try to plan ahead because advancing a career takes time and effort.
Simply asking for a raise or more responsibility when you want it, isn’t enough.
From the employer’s perspective, risk management is a component of the promotion process. You need to build up trust with your manager by demonstrating that you can handle more responsibility. Demonstrating your readiness for the next role, while you’re in your current role, sends an impactful signal to the organization’s leadership team.
This isn’t a journey that you have to take alone. Work proactively with your manager in planning out your career. This means:
- Getting feedback on how you can improve
- Asking for more responsibilities
- And then doing it
Actively showing that you are striving towards your career goals makes people want to invest in your career and help you out.
Know your key performance indicators (KPIs)
Your KPIs are unique to you and include goals for career growth and work-life balance. Laura Schaefer and Andrew Douglas had a great workshop at Ladders that helped attendees map out their career progression and the importance of KPIs.
Measure your success based on your own key performance indicators (KPIs). If your KPIs aren’t being met at your current job or you’ve achieved them and want to reach higher, it might be time to move on or seek out more responsibilities.
Find a work environment that suits you
Diversity and inclusion are always a key consideration for me as a woman and someone from a visible minority, but really, this should be top of mind for every designer.
However, diversity and inclusion are often only given lip service by employers who haven’t actively worked towards creating a culture or organizational structure that supports it.
This issue was addressed by the conference’s keynote speaker, Dean Dori Tunstall of OCAD University. For Tunstall, having a diverse group of people working together isn’t enough if the organization’s power structure doesn’t change.
“Inclusion is not enough when you’re asked to perform in a space that’s not true to yourself.”
When we ask our designers to work in an environment where they are unable to acknowledge and openly share their own backgrounds, it affects their ability to solve problems in an empathetic way.
She went on to say,
“If we want diversity and inclusion, we have to engage in respectful design so that the practice itself stops traumatizing our diverse professionals.”
Design can be a powerful tool to enact change. Fostering an environment where people’s diverse backgrounds and experiences are accepted enables designers to creatively engage in better informed, respectful design.
At the ODS, this is especially important for the work we do because it empowers us to advocate for the user throughout the design process.
My experience at the ODS
Working at the Ontario Digital Service (ODS) has exposed me to an organizational structure that truly supports diversity and inclusion. I’ve seen members across levels of leadership, down to interns, consistently working hard to foster an open environment where people can be themselves and freely express their thoughts and opinions. The ODS has been a great place to launch my design career and I look forward to what the future has in store for me.
