The 8 Benefits of Having a UX Mentor
No matter your experience or expertise.
Generally speaking, a career mentor is a trusted advisor who helps you achieve your own career goals and dreams, or in some cases helps you figure out what goals you’d like to achieve.
Key benefits of a UX mentor
Provides constructive feedback
Whether you’re working on your portfolio, resume, or standard UX work, a mentor can provide an extra set of constructive criticism. This type of aid is super helpful in situations where you might not have access to or the time to seek out feedback from your peers, coworkers, fellow students, or online UX chat groups.
Opening up a conversation with a mentor about your work also gives you the ability to practice receiving feedback — one of the most important skills to have as a UXer.
Runs mock interviews or design challenges
Conducting mock design challenges and interviews with a mentor will help you understand the expectations, requirements, and potential red flags surrounding the standard interview process.
Running fake interviews with a mentor allows you to fail and experiment in a controlled setting without any dire consequences to your career.
Expands your networking circle
Mentors can provide you access to their own UX groups, refer you to potential job leads, or even direct you to other mentors better suited for your specific needs. If they allow you to rummage through their network do not take their contacts for granted.
Clears away the white noise around UX
These days, there is too much UX content online to navigate and filter through all on your own. A mentor, especially a mentor in your expertise, can help you cut through all the B.S. and find the resources you need.
Directs you toward a path best suited for your strengths and needs
Fresh out of a boot camp? What should be your next step? Want to figure out your strengths? Uncover your weaknesses? A mentor can help you answer all these questions and lead you to the resources or people you may need to continue growing.
Helps solve (and prevent) any unexpected conflicts
More often than expected, you don’t know what you need to know until it’s too late — and in some cases, what you don’t know could cost you swaths of time and money. Most courses can’t prepare you for all the ins and outs of UX, business strategy, contract writing, and client relationships. Finding someone who has had exposure to all these topics can help you with recovering from your unexpected setbacks and prevent you from making them again.
Serves as a job reference
Mentors are great references to use for job applications. They’ve seen how you think firsthand and can speak on your strengths, uniqueness, and potential to hiring managers. Just be sure to get permission from your mentor first before you list them as a reference on a job application or any reference form.
Roots for you!
Who doesn’t love a friendly face on your side of the court? During your first few years as a UXer, it’s hard to feel like you’ve made any progress (or to even understand where you’ve made progress). It’s in your mentor’s best interest to see you succeed, and whenever you do succeed you can count on them to celebrate with you.
And even when you do experience setbacks, they’ll work with you to figure out what you need in order to get back on your feet again.
Who benefits from a UX mentor?
People with an ‘unconventional’ career background
If you were brought into UX through a boot camp, online courses, apprenticeship — basically by your bootstraps — mentorship can help open your eyes further into what’s possible for you in UX. A mentor can help you embrace the uniqueness of your career journey and help you figure out the next steps best for you.
People looking to refresh their UX knowledge
With the onset of new practices, ethics, and research, technology looks vastly different than it did twenty, even thirty years ago. Along with this change in tech, accessibility requirements, business strategies, even user experiences themselves have dramatically changed.
Sometimes unlearning what we once knew about UX can allow us to approach problems from a different and more nuanced perspective. With this, we can once again instill a fresh sense of curiosity, wonder, and passion about UX and all of its complicated yet fascinating parts.
People interested in UX freelancing
Freelancing is hard to master quickly and correctly. If you’re interested in freelancing, I highly suggest finding a mentor who has specific experience with navigating the waters of clients, contracts, and business. Having someone in your back pocket to rely on for advice is a great strategy for success.
People improving their portfolio
Even if you’d only want a mentor to help with your job application materials, you’ll still greatly benefit from another set of eyes looking at your work.
If you find a mentor who has experience hiring or recruiting UXers, their insight can help you better understand how to set you apart from other applicants.
Downsides of mentorship
Typically expensive
Mentors can be fairly expensive in the long run, the average cost for an hour session costing north of $50–150 USD (some cost up to $300 USD per hour).
Some mentors provide a free 15-minute consulting call to see if you’d both be a good fit for each other. If you’re able to schedule a consulting call, take advantage of it and make sure this mentor is right for your needs.
At first, it’s just speed dating
It might take you a few tries to find a mentor that suits you the best, regarding scheduling, price, how you communicate, expertise, and personality. Having an incompatible mentor could end up being more counterproductive than not having one at all.
Make sure that any mentor you decide to work with has the experience, expertise, and personality similar or complementary to yours.
The bottom line: If you feel like you’d benefit from mentoring then you most likely will. It doesn’t matter if you have zero, five, ten, even twenty years of experience in UX. If you think a mentor could help you with your career journey, then there’s a good chance there’s a mentor out there looking to work with someone just like you.
You can start searching for mentors on websites such as ADPList, CareerFoundry, or by running a generic search online. Some boot camps or online courses also supply their own networks of mentors as well, so if you have access to these programs then definitely take advantage of them.
All this said, simply having a mentor will not automatically make you succeed in the UX industry. Keep in mind that you are the one who has to put in the effort to make your career goals a reality. As long as you put in the work with a mentor’s guidance, there’s no telling how much you’ll achieve.
