Taking flight: Piloting career changes, from Engineering to Business Analysis to UX Design
Excitement, relief, frustration, and euphoria. Navigating a career change can overwhelm you with these feelings, but when properly planned, the benefits can be highly rewarding.
In this article, I’d like to share some of the most important lessons I learned during my career change into the field of user experience (UX). I hope they provide some transferable ideas for steering your own career pivot, regardless of which field you’re aiming for.
Who am I?
I’m Kulan, a UX Designer at Capgemini Invent. My career started in September 2019 as a Systems Engineer working in the aerospace and defence sectors. As I reflected on my goals, I realised I wanted a career in digital with a user-centred design (UCD) focus.
I was drawn to the appeal of working on innovative software and digital projects in fast-paced environments. Although the projects I worked on were interesting and important, I often felt that I was slowly progressing with a solution that someone else had devised, and I simply had to ensure it was implemented regardless of whether I believed in it or not.
What I was seeking was greater accountability, opportunities to be creative, and the ability to truly lead the design of a user-centric solution. It just so happened that I stumbled upon Interaction Design as a topic when looking into tools like Figma that could let me prototype ideas I had for apps and businesses. From my initial research, it almost seemed too good to be true that there was a field that catered for everything I was looking for, and it wasn’t long before I made it my goal to become a UX Designer.
It quickly became apparent that convincing people to let you be a UX Designer when you have no industrial experience is very difficult, and the gap between Aerospace Systems Engineering and UX Design seemed almost insurmountable. It took me months to accept that a sensible plan would be to make a partial but realistic transition into digital, which was to first become an Agile Business Analyst (BA). This was possible due to my transferable experience as an Engineer in writing requirements, developing system architectures, and having an analytical mindset.
I then joined Capgemini Invent in March 2022 as a BA and later moved into UX Design in December 2022. After overcoming career turbulence during the past few years, I can say I’ve finally found my career ‘flow’.
When times get turbulent, be your own pilot.
So, how did I get there? Well, the transition to UX took much longer than I expected, but hopefully, my experience can help you shorten that journey for yourself.
When COVID-19 hit the UK in 2020, I was placed on furlough leave. This was a government scheme which meant I retained my employment but with reduced pay and no work. I took this opportunity to upskill in UX and see if it was right for me, so I later enrolled on a remote UX bootcamp with General Assembly. This consisted of several hour-long lessons a week hosted on Zoom, for a duration of 11 weeks. Here, I learned about conducting user interviews, writing user stories, making a prototype in Figma, usability testing, and even storytelling. Although this was a UX bootcamp, I learned about Agile, which also helped me to become a BA.
COVID presented a period of uncertainty for everyone, and with people being so focused on their careers, I learned to not be overly reliant on others to seek opportunities or forge connections on my behalf. When I returned to work, I looked for any opportunities where I could test my newfound UX skills. I conducted user interviews on engineering projects, created affinity maps for business development initiatives, and picked up several short-term interaction design projects. The grind had begun.
Plan, do, study, act — but don’t put off the ‘do’.
I spent a lot of time watching videos and reading about UX, rather than doing UX. It was procrastination masked as productivity. I should have been learning new tools, creating a portfolio, or practising user interviews. After all, UX is a practical discipline which demands practical experience.
Equipped with the benefit of hindsight, I would of course do things differently. I recommend crafting your own 70:20:10 learning journey.
For the 70%, seek out projects to join in a company that has UX designers — or whatever role you’re looking to move to. Share your career ambitions with them, ask to shadow, and gradually participate in design work. If this isn’t possible, or if opportunities don’t arise organically, identify design problems in your workplace or local community, consider joining voluntary initiatives with design potential, or engage in design challenges (e.g., from websites like Daily UI) to enhance your skills. Ensure there is a real user group you can test your designs with and treat it like an actual project. Document these initiatives in a portfolio, and you’ll be prepared for when opportunities come your way.
For the 20% collaboration, participate in workshops, design critiques and other events to learn from and engage with others. You can also find a mentor using your network, LinkedIn, or a mentorship site like ADPList.
For the final 10%, you can enrol in courses like the Google UX Design Certificate, or bootcamps like General Assembly’s which have coursework and deadlines to keep you on track. Some bootcamps follow the 70:20:10 model by design, providing experience, mentoring, and lectures, but these can be very expensive. Alternatively, platforms like Udemy, Coursera, edX, and LinkedIn Learning offer valuable resources, often at low-to-no cost. Some employers may reimburse your learning costs, so enquire about that.
By doing a combination of these things, you should naturally start to build a portfolio that evidences your UX experience, which you can present to people with potential opportunities.
Experiment to find your ‘flow’.
UX is a diverse field, with specialisms such as ‘Interaction Designer’, ‘UX Writer’, ‘User Researcher’ and more.
You realise that it’s half the battle to know that you want to go into something “user-centred”, and it’s another story altogether to then discover your niche.
In my first project at Capgemini, I engaged in varied activities like market analysis, co-design workshops, and prototyping. I was lucky enough to work with experts in UX design, product ownership, user research, and service design. To help understand my niche, I adopted an experimental approach and evaluated the tasks I did using fulfilment, focus, and happiness as indicators of being in a state of ‘flow’.
In the words of psychologist Csikszentmihalyi, ‘flow’ is “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable.”
His model states that flow is felt when a task is sufficiently challenging that your abilities are enough to overcome it, but you also have a pleasant experience doing it. Over several weeks, I performed multiple user-centred design tasks, such as conducting user interviews, hosting design workshops and even testing Figma prototypes using Maze. I analysed my flow levels for each activity, and the higher the number, the more I felt in flow.
As I reflected on each week, it soon became apparent that interaction design and usability testing brought the most ‘flow’, confirming I was on the right path. I would thoroughly recommend taking an approach such as this to keep track of the activities you do, to help you in your career pivot.
What happened next?
I felt ready to communicate my plans to propel my UX Design career. I informed my line manager and both outgoing and incoming team leads of my desire to change. As I had built a portfolio which demonstrated my real-world UX experience over two years, the team leads were receptive to my case and the formal change happened quickly. I became a UX Designer.
After what felt like the longest two years of my life, I was relieved to not be in limbo anymore and grateful to have concluded this part of my journey. This was also possible due to Capgemini Invent embodying the ethos of helping their people get the future they want.
What skills are transferable?
Engineers or BAs may have experience in speaking to stakeholders to gather user requirements. This skill is transferable when conducting user interviews to better understand user needs. Additionally, the skills gained from process mapping and developing architecture diagrams can translate to building a service blueprint or user journey map. The meticulous technical writing abilities of an Engineer or BA prove useful in crafting user interview discussion guides or documenting design decisions.
Numeracy, whether as an Engineer or BA, aligns well with the quantitative aspect of UCD. Examples of this include determining which metrics to measure the usability of your product against, unravelling the meaning behind website session analytics, or conducting controlled usability tests to enhance your designs.
At its core, changing career involves recognising your transferable skills so you can capitalise on the parallels between where you currently are (e.g. engineering or business analysis) and your desired destination (e.g. user-centred design). Transitioning to UCD requires empathy and a mindset shift from being purely systems-focused to user-centric as well. If you find yourself encapsulated by what users have to say and the possibilities of helping them, then it’s likely UCD is for you.
What am I up to now?
Fast forward to today, and I’m a UX Designer working on improvements to three live services. I am constantly learning on the job, whether it’s new HTML tricks to develop prototypes in code, accessibility testing methods or best practices for content design. I am fortunate enough to have fortnightly UX mentorship sessions and I’m always finding ways to bolster my skills.
Early on in your career transition, expect the “graft” — doing cumbersome tasks as practice, including those you might not enjoy. The most difficult part of this journey was accepting that sometimes things don’t happen when we want them to, so patience and perseverance are vital. Know when to take a break to refuel and don’t take off again until you’re ready. Things can get better over time.
If you’d like to know more about how I got into UX, want to chat about your own experiences, or spotted all the aviation puns in this article, please feel free to reach out.
