Tips for UX Student Resumes

It’s tough to create an impactful resume that captures the essence of who you are, especially when you are a student or someone trying to transition into the design field and don’t have this vast backlog of applicable work experience to draw upon. On the Upstream UX team at ExxonMobil, we review many resumes every year, and we have identified some common themes in the ones that stand out. In this article, we’ll share some tips and best practices that you can apply to improve your resume.

This article is the first of a series of tips for how students can improve their chances to land that first UX designer or user researcher role.

Basics

Style

Your resume will be the first expression of your design skills that a hiring manager sees, but you have to balance that expression with practicalities of what a hiring manager needs to see (experience and skills), what potential recruiters and HR expect, and the limitations of file format.

While some hiring managers might find a standard style resume a little boring, recruiters, HR, and other hiring managers expect to see a more standard style. Deviating from a standard style will set you apart, but the higher the deviation, the higher the risk that a reviewer will react negatively to your style. Your portfolio or website is a much better place to showcase your design style.

A basic, single column style may be easier for an automated system to parse if a prospective employer uses one. Some recruiting agencies will also want to edit your resume into a more standard style, so a simpler style will reduce the chances that a recruiting agency will mangle your resume after they force it into their standard format. A two column style is still likely acceptable.

Make sure that the resume is legible if printed out on a standard sized paper (US Letter (aka ANSI A) or A4 depending on your region) since you will need a printed copy for career fairs and the hiring team may want to print out a copy for use during interviews.

File Format

You’ll want to be able to provide your resume in multiple file formats as requested. Certainly, having a .PDF version will be acceptable most places, but you should also have a .DOC or .DOCX version since a recruiting agency may want to modify your resume (to remove contact information or add their logo) before submitting it to a prospective employer.

If you are using nonstandard fonts in a .PDF file, be sure that the fonts are embedded in your file. For .DOC or .DOCX files only use fonts that are commonly available on operating systems (e.g. Arial, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Verdana, Calibri, Cambria, and Helvetica among others).

File Name

Only submit resumes that include your first name, last name, and “resume” in the title. You might have multiple versions of the resume with file names like MyResume_ExxonMobil_v5Final.pdf on your desktop, but what you submit to a job posting should have your first name, your last name, and resume in the file name so that the hiring manager can easily find it when she is looking for it in a list of files.

I’m frequently surprised by the number of files that I have to rename because they just are “MyResume.pdf” and “Transcript.pdf”.

Identification Information

In addition to your name, email address, and mobile number, include your LinkedIn profile URL, portfolio URL, and whether you have a permanent right to work in the US or will require sponsorship.

Employers will want to see your LinkedIn profile and portfolio, so make it easy for them.

You don’t need to include your mailing address unless you’re looking for a job outside of your current geographic area. In that case, employers may want to know if you are local to the area. Even then, a mailing address is optional: a city and state will be sufficient.

Not all companies can or will sponsor for OPT or H-1B, so make it easy for the hiring manager to know if you need or don’t need sponsorship. A phrase like “Available for OPT”, “Require H-1B sponsorship”, “Have Permanent Right to Work”, or “US Citizen” reduces friction when a hiring manager is reviewing your resume.

Including whether you want to be a “UX Designer”, “User Researcher”, or other desired role or title can be helpful if there is any doubt. If you would truly be equally happy with more than one role, you could make a slightly different resume for each role and then submit the resume that best matches the job posting.

Spell Check and Proofread

Spell check your resume, especially if you aren’t using a word processor to create your resume. And proofread it again and again and again. Proofread it on the screen. Proofread it by printing it out and then reviewing on paper.

Ask a trusted friend to proofread it: you may read over your typo multiple times, but another person may catch the typo immediately. Proofread it by reading the resume out loud to your friend. Or use Adobe Acrobat or some other text to speech functionality to have your computer read your resume to you.

The repeated proofreading may seem a little excessive, but it is astounding how your brain can fill in what it expects to see as your eye skips past errors. I was amazed (and a little mortified) at the errors that I found on my own resume that I submitted to ExxonMobil even after I repeatedly proofread it.

Major Sections

Your resume will likely have several major sections: Education, Work Experience, Selected Projects, and Skills and Tools/Software. You will probably want to list these sections in order of importance and strength. While in school or just out of school, Education should probably come first. Afterwards, the Education section can be listed after Work Experience, and you will eventually drop Selected Projects.

Summary / Objective

You can safely leave off a summary or objective section if you include the desired role/title as part of identification information.

If you want to include a summary, you should include the information in a cover letter which you can customize to the company and job posting.

Education

Your education section should include, for each degree achieved, your degree, field of study, the full name of the institution, the city and state/country where it is located, and the dates that you attended (preferably month and year). If you haven’t graduated yet, include the month and year of your projected graduation.

Also include your GPA if you are still in school or graduated recently: employers will ask.

Work Experience

Include relevant work experience and internships as well as seemingly less relevant work experience. Your 3 years of working at a neighborhood restaurant while completing your undergraduate degree might not directly relate to design, but they show your work ethic to a hiring manager as well as speak to your ability to work in a customer facing role.

For each position, include your official title, the name of the company, the location, the dates of employment (including month and year), your responsibilities, and any achievements.

A responsibility is an activity that you did: “Created wireframes”. An achievement is a notable result of an activity: “Wireframes for the exploration cards won the Best Intern Design award”.

Include the month and the year on all dates: if you just include the year (for example “A Tech Company, 2020–2020”), hiring managers can’t tell if you were there a week or an entire year. When I see dates with just the year, I assume that a candidate is trying to make their tenure sound longer than it really is and is potentially covering up a gap in employment.

Include more details for more relevant work experience (that design internship from last summer) and fewer details for less relevant work experience (that summer job at a grocery store after your first year at college).

Try to incorporate skills into the responsibilities without making them so generic as to be meaningless. For example, “Created wireframes” is very generic. On the other hand, “Created wireframes for 4 forecasting visualization dashboards using ADesignTool” is much more specific and impactful.

Project Experience

If your work experience is a little sparse, you can include a section of projects drawn from class or personal projects that are in your portfolio. List them in order of importance as well as relevance to the company to which you are applying. For example, if you are applying to an ecommerce company, you probably want to list the ecommerce project first rather than the healthcare project.

For each project, include the project name, dates with month and year, sponsor or client if applicable, and a short description of the project and your role.

Skills and Tools/Software

You can include notable skills and tools/software in a separate section though including your strongest skills also in the context of work experience can be very impactful. Doing so may help get past some sort of automated keyword reviewing system but keep in mind that a skills or tools/software section starts to detract from your resume if it becomes an overly long, randomly organized, keyword salad.

Be selective about the skills and tools/software that you list and include them in order of importance or use.

Leave out skills and tools/software that are ones that you don’t want to use, are irrelevant, or with which you only have a passing familiarity.

Skill Bars and Skill Ratings

Skill bars and skill ratings are 96.5% useless on a resume. When I see a skill bar or rating, I grumble and disregard it because I have no idea how that rating was assessed and validated (much like the rating of the usefulness of skill bars above).

Closing Thoughts

Much more could be and has been written about preparing a good resume: the above tips just address some of the most common items that we see in resumes for UX designers and user researchers. Having a well-crafted resume is your chance to present a summary of your qualifications to hiring managers, and I hope that applying some of these tips will improve your odds of being noticed.

We’ll continue the next article in this series with a set of portfolio or work sample tips.