Making the Switch to UX:
5 Lessons from my Apprenticeship
As anyone who’s gone through this before knows, making a career switch isn’t easy. On top of that, the field of UX is notoriously competitive and constantly changing. While online courses certainly help you learn some basic skills, an HR manager is unlikely to hire someone without previous experience, and “you need experience to get experience.”
When I found the Apprenticeship program at UXReactor, it seemed perfect for someone like me, whose portfolio consisted of grad school projects and a brief UI design internship.
My time as an Apprentice was both more challenging and more rewarding than I envisioned. Now that the Apprenticeship is done and I am officially an Associate UX Consultant, I wanted to write this article about the biggest lessons I learned along the way, and I hope that it can help someone like me who’s thinking about making a career switch to the awesome world of UX design.
But First: My Background Before UX
I started my career as a civil engineer, working on exciting projects in New York City. I’m passionate about cities, specifically how I could make transportation infrastructure better and more enjoyable for the people who live there. However, the actual day-to-day was not as enjoyable or rewarding as I wanted it to be. I often was annoyed that things we designed didn’t account for the user’s experience — for instance, we might make a functional transit station, but it would be difficult for people to navigate. My frustrations with civil engineering made UX appealing to me since UX focuses on the user’s perspective and rewards challenging the status quo.
Making the Switch
I began a long period of soul-searching and researching different industries. The field of UX Design stood out to me because it seemed like a good match between my interests in understanding human behavior, creativity, problem-solving, and technology. I started my journey by quitting my job and moving to Barcelona for a year to get my master’s in Cognitive Science & Interactive Media, and when I came back I completed a UI internship for a small startup. After that, I accepted an offer at UXReactor for the 6-month Apprenticeship program!
What I Learned from My Apprenticeship
During the first month of my Apprenticeship, I participated in several formalized lessons where I learned about UXReactor’s process. After completing the first month, I began to apply these lessons as I was put on several different projects. Now that my Apprenticeship has come to an end, the skills that I had learned enabled me to own aspects of the projects I’m on, such as running my own usability studies. While I learned many useful things during my Apprenticeship, the following are the top 5 lessons that I think would be most valuable for someone looking to start a career in UX Design.
- How to Think Like a Designer (and a Researcher)
- The Importance of Having a Team (and Feedback!)
- How to Embody the Right Mindset
- How to Handle Ambiguity
- How to Deal with Imposter Syndrome
Lesson 1: How to Think Like a Designer (and a Researcher)
I learned a lot of valuable skills as a civil engineer and a management consultant, some of which helped me in my new career, such as engaging with clients, being detail-oriented, and leveraging effective project management. However, thinking like an engineer isn’t the same as thinking like a designer. I was used to simply providing output as a means to an end, but what I learned is that a good UX designer is outcome-focused. This means thinking about why you’re doing a task, and always relating it back to how it solves user or business goals.
I also learned how being a UX designer isn’t simply designing things that look nice or are usable — it means basing your design decisions on research, so you can prove your design is solving a specific problem. When conducting research, you need to know the right types of questions to ask, to prevent your own biases from getting in the way of real and valuable insights.
Thinking like a UX designer means that you always tie things back to the user. Even as a researcher or a consultant, we think about what our users know or don’t know and make sure our communication is designed in a way that makes sense to them. Everything we do here comes from a problem-solving and outcome mindset.
Lesson 2: The Importance of Having a Team (Feedback!)
One of the most important things I learned at UXReactor was the importance of your team. In the beginning, I didn’t reach out to people as much as I should have, and it led to a lot of back and forth and would slow down the project. Asking questions made me feel like I was taking time out of someone’s day, but I quickly realized that it actually saves time in the long run.
Everyone was friendly and helpful, like Jamie, who ran the lessons during my first month and also gave me constructive feedback that helped me grow. During the Apprentice capstone project, I ran a practice user research session with an employee named Jon, who gave me some good insights on what I did well and where I could improve, which helped me later on when I conducted user research with actual users.
I learned the importance of building a relationship with your team — that you need to be proactive in reaching out to people and speaking up during meetings. UXReactor is a big advocate of breaking down silos within organizations, and in order to be successful, you need to constantly give and take feedback from other members of the organization.
UXReactor has a variety of people, many of which come from different backgrounds (like me!), and those people aren’t shy about bringing those various skills to help drive our UX projects. Although there’s a lot of diversity in terms of geographical location and work backgrounds, the people here all have something in common: they utilize the same design process and have the same mindsets. This leads me to my next lesson…
Lesson 3: How to Embody the Right Mindset
One of the subjects that stuck with me during the first month of my Apprenticeship was learning about the mindsets at UXReactor. There were eight mindsets total, but the two that stuck with me the most were:
- Outcome Mindset: Focus not just on getting a task done, but rather on what you’re trying to achieve
- Growth Mindset: Welcoming failure and learning from it
I originally had trouble with the Outcome Mindset due to my engineering background — in my previous career, engineers were expected to focus on tangible results and producing outputs, not necessarily on the “why” or as we like to say at UXReactor, the “so what?” Being a good UX Designer isn’t about coming up with the best screens or features as quickly as possible, it’s about creating outcomes that actually solve your user’s problems.
This required me to shift the way I thought about my work, which, if you happen to be switching from a technical background to UX, is something you need to work on. My mentor at UXReactor, Sarah, gave me some good advice that should help someone who’s also making a similar career switch:
Be outcome-focused instead of task-driven. Think of the intent behind what you’re doing. After you’re done with a task, before you submit it, take a 5-minute break. When you come back, put yourself in the shoes of the person reading your work, and perform a self-review from that perspective.
As for the Growth Mindset, I was happy to hear that was a core value at UXReactor because it’s a value that I strongly believe in. Maybe because I’m an optimist, but I’ve always looked at failures as opportunities, part of a natural process to grow.
It also helps that I already read the book Mindset by Carol Dweck (I highly recommend it, by the way). A company that embraces this mindset encourages its employees to give and take feedback and be candid with each other because feedback is a crucial part of helping people be the best they can be. Feedback is also a big part of my next lesson…
Lesson 4: How to Handle Ambiguity
When you switch careers, everything feels new and different. Terminology and processes vary wildly, and you may find yourself dealing with a lot of ambiguity. Thankfully, having a helpful and effective team is probably the best way to handle these situations because you can reduce the ambiguity for yourself by (as I mentioned before) asking questions and getting feedback! And if you switch to a dynamic and challenging field like UX, you’ll need all the feedback you can get to help you navigate the inevitable uncertainty.
Despite my fear of sounding ignorant, my teammates were never annoyed when I asked them a question. They were able and more than willing to hear me out. Asking a lot of questions was highly encouraged, and catching those problems early saved a lot of time in the long run.
Another thing I learned was that you can reduce the ambiguity of outcomes by conducting dry runs with your team. Similarly, I learned the importance of being proactive and taking initiative — experimenting during downtime and thinking about the work you’re doing, in order to be prepared for any type of situation that may come up.
Lesson 5: How to Deal with Imposter Syndrome
Ah, imposter syndrome. This is something that affects a lot of people in various aspects of their lives — and since many people move to UX from different industries, they often second-guess themselves and suffer from self-doubt to some degree. It can be hard for someone to accept that they are a struggling Apprentice when they may have been a successful manager in their previous career.
At UXReactor, my mentor always pushed me to take on more and more responsibility. As someone who was always told to “think like an engineer,” I sometimes doubted whether I had the aptitude to actually be a successful UX designer; if I could even think creatively or outside the box when it was so different from the career I spent the majority of my 20’s on. Was I ready to run usability studies or drive a team engagement?
In the end, I was successful in dealing with the added responsibility. Yes, I made occasional mistakes, but as long as you have the willingness to learn from them (Growth Mindset), you’ll be fine.
It’s important to stay humble — you can’t know everything instinctively, and you’re not expected to. Furthermore, my team at UXReactor seemed to have a good grasp on maintaining the delicate balance of pushing you and encouraging you to go for the gold and succeed while offering a lot of support when needed.
Eventually, once you reflect on your work and see that you’ve actually done things that you didn’t think you’d be able to do a year ago, imposter syndrome has less of an impact on you. It doesn’t go away (at least not in your first year!), but the voice of self-confidence can and will drown it out instead.
Conclusion
If you’re even reading this article, there’s a good chance you made or are making a transition similar to the one I did — and that alone is a reason to be proud of yourself. You’ll deal with a lot of highs and lows on your journey, but I hope my 5 lessons here are able to help someone out. Basically, the best advice I can give you is to take ownership of your work, to leverage the skills you have in your previous career while understanding which needs to be modified, to be curious, to make good use of your team, and to be adaptable.
Although my Apprenticeship is over and I have successfully made this career transition, I am still very much applying these 5 lessons constantly at my job and continuing to learn and grow. And one last thing — your past career makes you unique, and you never know when it might help you find an insight no one else thought of — your perspective and your drive are what helps you become a good UX Designer.
