How to land your first UX job - Part 1: Building skills
Is UX the job of your dreams? In this two-part series, Mark Owen, senior experience designer and hiring manager at Sainsbury’s, shares his tips on how to kickstart your future UX career today.
UX. How can two letters carry so much appeal?
Anyone who has ever had to recruit for a junior UX role knows it can attract hundreds of applications. Not ideal for busy hiring managers, who have to sift through for the good ones. Even less ideal for those earnestly looking for their first user experience role.
UX is a hard industry to crack. Not only is it extraordinarily popular, it’s also experience-driven. Basically, you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get the experience. It’s a catch-22.
So, what happens when you turn it on its head?
What if you saw that experience vs. job obstacle as an opportunity? Tackling it head-on and gaining valuable skills and knowledge that will help you in your job search, your career, and life in general? You’d be onto a winning formula, that’s what.
In my role as senior experience designer at Sainsbury’s, I’ve spent the last two years recruiting and developing a UX team. I’ve reviewed countless CVs, interviewed dozens of people, and built a team of people who have the right mix of skills to work collaboratively and effectively.
In this article, I’ll show you how to build the skills and knowledge you need to land your first UX job. The technical skills, the soft skills and an appreciation of why UX is so important.
Understand your why
But before we get to any of that, we need to take a step back and get to grips with the fundamentals. That is: Why do you want to be a UX designer in the first place?
Is it because you want to help people? Maybe you want to make a difference? Perhaps you like solving problems? Or, is it because UX feels like the go-to design role right now?
There’s no right or wrong answer. But some motivations will make you more determined in your job search — and more engaged in your future UX role.
Put it this way. You can get job stability and a good wage in other tech-related roles. To be a success in UX, you need a more intrinsic motivation. That means being willing to give it everything you’ve got. The skills needed to appreciate both humans and technology. And a solid grasp of why UX is so important to businesses today.
Develop your technical skills
First up, those technical skills. Absolutely crucial for landing any UX role.
The only problem is there’s no hard and fast rule to which ones you need for any given application. Every role, every team and every company are looking for a slightly different mix of technical skills. Suffice to say, it can all get pretty complicated. So, let’s keep things simple.
At its core, UX is a process that follows the 4Ds:
Discover: Immerse yourself in the problem through research. Understand, don’t assume. Identify the problems (and why they are problems)
Define: Connect your research data to design ideas. Beware of jumping straight to a solution and of getting fixated on ideas. The research should guide your decisions…
Develop: Time to come up with some solutions. Listen to others, don’t just focus on your own ideas. A good designer isn’t someone who always has the best ideas, it’s someone who finds and develops them, no matter where they come from.
Deliver: Weed out the solutions that don’t work and hone the ones that do. Prepare the design for launch.
If you use these four steps as your basis for acquiring technical skills, you’ll cover all bases. Which is all very well, but where do you start?
1 Learn the theory
Before you do anything else, you need a foundation on which to build your skills. And you can find that in UX theory. Better still, it doesn’t have to cost a thing: Here’s how:
- Study the 4Ds and why they’re the backbone of UX: Once you understand the process, you can start applying it. With application comes experience and with experience comes skill and confidence.
- Follow experienced, well-established, and respected designers and/or organisations: For example, Nielsen Norman Group and Jared Spool.
- Read, listen and absorb: Books, blogs (ours is great, as is GDS and Co-op), podcasts, videos — take your pick.
- Attend events: These could be talks, conferences or meet-ups.
2 Take courses
Quality UX courses are more accessible than ever. Some are full-time and intensive, others are short, modular and can be done at your own pace. Some are free, others cost thousands. Some need big upfront investment, others are subscription-based. Find what works for you and invest in it.
3 Find a mentor
What can be more valuable to your development than the guidance and support of a professional? Someone who’s where you want to be and has been where you are now. This kind of support can be adapted to you and your changing needs. And unlike taking a professional course, your development will be broader, more personal and arguably, more real-world applicable.
A mentor can help you:
● Understand UX processes
● Develop your skill set
● Build a network
● Practice on real or realistic briefs
● Teach you the nuance that courses can’t
● Give you access to opportunities
Before finding a mentor, take time to think about what you want from yours. Every mentor is unique, with different skills, knowledge and experience. The clearer you are on what you want, the easier it’ll be finding the right one.
When looking for a mentor, ask them about:
● Their experience and skillset
● How much time they can commit
● Their approach to mentoring
● Whether they’ve been where you are now
● Their values and whether they align with yours
● How they will help you grow
Understand outcomes, hypothesis and measures
Never mind experience, the biggest skills gap I’ve seen over the years is a lack of understanding about the purpose of UX. Many people believe it’s about making things easier, simpler and more enjoyable for the user.
It’s not.
The purpose of UX is to create successful outcomes — for customers AND businesses. So, increasing sales, reducing operational costs, and retaining customers. Making things simpler could help lead to these outcomes, but it’s never going to be an outcome itself.
Every single project needs to start by defining those outcomes. Which is where your hypothesis comes in. Used in science to validate ideas, it is essentially your route to understanding how you might achieve an outcome.
Here’s how to create a hypothesis template:
● Start with your outcome: Let’s say yours is to reduce operational costs
● Identify problems and opportunities: Let’s assume you’ve found a process that’s taking 20 minutes on average to complete and you’re doing it thousands of times a year. That’s hundreds of hours of labour wasted
● Use a hypothesis template: For example: If [action] then [outcome] because [customer need/problem]
Finally, everything you do in a UX role needs a measurable impact. This can be where things get tricky. Because, contrary to popular opinion, understanding how to measure success isn’t just about the feedback you receive. Instead, it’s about identifying metrics that will tell you what impact your work is having on customers and the business. You need a balance — if customers say the changes are great but sales have dropped, that’s a failure, and vice-versa.
Develop your (so-called) soft skills
Of course, technical skills will only get you so far in UX. To really fly, you also need soft skills. Although saying that, there’s nothing soft about them.
They’re much harder to develop than technical skills. They’re straight-forward in comparison, revolving around learning tools, processes, theory and application. Soft skills involve people. And as we all know, people are notoriously complex.
In fact, the most effective designers I know aren’t the best technically. They’re exceptional because they know how to:
● Influence people
● Communicate fluently (verbally, physically and written)
● Be courageous
● Show rapport
● Express kindness
Put simply, you could be the best designer in the world, but if you can’t deal with people, you’re going to struggle.
Put everything into practice
The only way to develop skills is by applying them. There’s a big difference between absorbing information and putting it into practice.
Not to put too fine a point on it, practice is EVERYTHING. You need to practise to understand nuance. To learn which skills work best in which contexts. And to develop your own style.
These are all things you’ll only learn over time, with experimentation and by putting your skills into practice.
Getting your first job in UX is hard. Yes. Competitive. Certainly. But impossible? Absolutely not.
If you have the right mindset, are willing to make mistakes, and continually make (and review) your goals, who knows where your UX career will take you.
Mark Owen, Staff Experience Designer
