FAQ about ShopBack’s Research Process (Part 3/3)
My team had a great time recently sharing about our working culture in a local design community — Friends of Figma. We enjoyed the session and were heartened by the positive reception. We’re grateful for the opportunity and appreciate the organisers’ help in preparing the session. If you’re keen to watch the session, you may catch it below.
During the talk, we received questions on switching careers to UX. Here are our thoughts on how you can approach this! I’ve compiled the questions and shared the answers here. This post is the last post of a FAQ series, and here’s my first and second blogpost if you missed it.
Career Switchers
What will be the advise for people who’s from non UX related field but has strong interest in it.
Firstly, hats off to all the career switchers! I personally have been pursuing UX Research since I graduated and don’t see myself having the guts to switch to other career paths. I really appreciate people who are in the journey of shifting to UX. UX is a really young field. Design and research leaders have different standards when it comes to looking for UX Researchers. Some hiring managers prefer to have more specialised UX Researchers, some others prefer to have more generalised researchers. I personally believe that the diversity of our backgrounds and expertise will make us more creative in terms of how we build our playbook of UX Research practices. This is why I’m really happy to have team members with a wide range of background (except myself 😝). We have:
- Amy, who used to be an industrial designer.
- Jasmine, who used to work in a more academic type of research with a background in psychology.
- Iju, is a cognitive linguist who is now learning UX Researcher.
- Ha Min, our intern who recently joined the team, who studies international business and linguistics.
What I have seen more based on the people I have mentored so far is that people can be too focused on their goal of shifting. I believe that you should identify you strengths first or a domain that you have experience in, and plan out a step-by-step career switch rather than making a big jump into UX. If you are a creative designer, maybe you can try UX Designer or UI Designer roles first before entering UX Research. If you are an account manager, perhaps you can try product management roles or even account management roles in UX agencies. Working in UX agencies can give you exposure to UX Research methodologies and processes. If you are someone from the healthcare industry, you can try to find UX Research roles in health-tech startups. Your domain knowledge will be valuable to them.
Another tip that I can recommend is to find a mentor with a similar journey to you. You can use LinkedIn and its filters to find UX Researchers globally with specific educational backgrounds. Look at their profiles and learn how they shifted into UX. If you manage to talk to them, ask what worked for them, and get their advice on how your previous domain knowledge and strengths can help in the transitioning journey.
Hiring
How will you advise a mid career switcher if they are keen to join your team? What are the processes to go through?
Is ShopBack looking to hire interns during the college summer period?
And yes, we are hiring! We are open to meeting Product Designers, UX Researchers, career switchers, psychologists, linguists, interior designers, musicians, model, you name it! In fact, we already have them in our team at the moment and you might be the next one.
My goal is to groom my team to become UX Research experts in the industry. While I’m not the best UX Researcher, I’m quite confident in my ability to mentor and coach them. If you join our team, I can assure you that I will put the time and effort to train you to be the best UX Researcher you can be. 😁
Or if you are still thinking to apply to us, you can also get a trial experience of our coaching and mentoring skills through ADPList:
- Mike Chen: Sheep Herder | LinkedIn | ADPList
- Samantha Soh: Senior Product Designer | LinkedIn | ADPList
- Anh Pham: Senior Product Designer | LinkedIn | ADPList
- Peko Chen: Senior Product Designer | LinkedIn | ADPList
I hope this series of posts is not too sales-y and informative enough for you to consider whether we are the right team for you to join or not. Hope to see you next time! 🙂👋🏻
Huge thank you to Rachel, our content strategist for restructuring and editing my brain fart. If you think my writing is nice, it wasn’t me. I was just farting my thoughts from my brain.
If you have stayed till the end of this post, know that I am super thankful for your time. I hope you’ll take a thing or two away from our experiences! Anyway, I’m always excited to meet new people, so hit me up for coffee or tea anytime. You may also find me in ADPList. 😁
❗️ Interested in what else we work on?
Follow us (ShopBack Tech blog | ShopBack LinkedIn page) now to get further insights on what our tech teams do!
❗❗️ Or… interested in us? (definitely, we hope 😂)
Check out here how you might be able to fit into ShopBack — we’re excited to start our journey together!
