How to transition to a UX job

You’ve been working in a different field for several years, and now you want a career in user experience. How can you make sure your resume stands out, and how can you answer interview questions confidently?

I do NOT believe in faking it until you make it. But you’d be surprised how many of your past experiences might transfer well into a UX role. 

Demonstrate that you’ve learned the basics

Obviously you’re going to need some understanding of the tools and techniques used in UX. Otherwise you’re engaging in wishful thinking rather than a real job search. 

Although you don’t need to master every UX technique before you apply for a job, you do at least need to know what you don’t know. You need to have a grounding in the core methods and terminology, and be at least aware of some of the other techniques that are used.  

There are many ways to gain UX knowledge. There are multiple bootcamps and other learning opportunities. If you have access to LinkedIn Learning through work, your library, or a personal subscription, consider my UXsyllab.us learning path. It’s made up of video courses and “homework” portfolio assignments to give you the UX knowledge you need for a practical job position. 

How can you show that you’ve gained this knowledge? 

• Certificates - Although I’m not a fan of certificates, they are one way to show recruiters that you’ve at least undertaken a training course. 
• Resume - If you have learned informally by working with a UX team or incorporating UX techniques into your work, describe this in your resume along with what the outcomes were. 
• Portfolio - If you’ve completed a bootcamp or course series that helps you build a portfolio, that’s an ideal way to highlight what you’ve achieved.   

Highlight your other relevant work experience

UX-specific skills are only part of the job. A large proportion of a UX person’s time is spent working to understand what the team needs to know, and then helping them implement changes once you’ve found it out. 

UX is a go-between role, bringing business and IT together. It most often involves influencing without authority. Collaboration skills and the ability to help teams reach consensus are very important. 

These skills aren’t specific to UX. Think about parts of your current and previous jobs that demonstrate skill such as

• Requirements gathering
• Designing the methodology for research studies
• Working with colleagues from different disciplines
• Understanding user/customer needs
• Collating, summarizing, and interpreting data
• Presenting findings and gaining consensus
• Working with other team members to implement changes

The experience might be in a different setting, but it could transfer well. For instance any research you did for a degree is likely applicable because it demonstrates you know the scientific method. Bonus points if you used research techniques which could transfer to UX like interviews, surveys, or anything that measured changes in human behavior. 

These are the elements that you should highlight in your resume. Be sure to phrase your existing skills in ways that are relevant to a UX job. The trick is to help anyone who is reading your resume to immediately understand how your previous experience is relevant to the position they are trying to fill.

Product development awareness is a plus

Although you don’t need programming skills, it’s great if you’ve had experience working on a development project with programmers, project and product managers, testers, or even in allied roles such as on the marketing and communications team. 

Recruiters are looking for candidates who can hit the ground running. Familiarity with product development processes and tools (Jira, GitHub, etc.) is a pretty good sign that you’ll be able to fit in, even if the exact tools the team uses are different. 

It’s possible that you can’t get that experience at work, but how about entering a hackathon, working on an open source project, or partnering with developers in your portfolio projects?

If you don’t have that background, don’t worry. You can still highlight similar skills. 

• Working to a deadline
• Making trade-offs, cutting features/elements of a project
• Taking responsibility for small parts of a larger undertaking

I said it’s not important that you know how to code. What I will say though is that it’s good to know how code gets written and put into a product. Get someone who writes code as part of a team to show you how that works. It'll be different from org to org, but the overall concepts will be similar, and now you'll have a framework to hang new concepts from. 

Do you need a portfolio?

Here’s a dirty secret. Lots of senior UX people never had to create a portfolio in order to get a job. The requirement is pretty recent, especially for roles that focus on interaction design or research rather than visual design. The people who interview you for a position may not have a portfolio themselves! Unfair? Maybe. But creating a portfolio can set you apart from others in a similar position.

Let’s first define what “portfolio” means in this situation. A better description might be “visual case study.” Typically you’ll step through one or two projects you worked on, describing the purpose of the project, what your contribution was, what challenges you faced, and how you overcame them. If the project went live, you typically also offer some metrics describing how successful it was. 

Making those case studies visual, with examples of the artifacts you created (experience maps, personas, prototypes, etc.) helps recruiters quickly understand what you did and the impact it had. 

It seems like a Catch-22 situation. You haven’t worked in UX, so where are you supposed to source content for a portfolio of your previous work? I think that the best UX training programs are the ones that help you create a portfolio as you progress. Bootcamps do this. My syllabus does this (https://uxsyllab.us/projects/). Real-world problems make much better case studies than a notional redesign of Facebook ever could.

Portfolios are jumping off points for conversations about your skill set. They help recruiters quickly see whether you’ve ever actually applied the techniques you list in your resume. 

You might still be able to get away without creating a portfolio. However, even if you’re looking for a research or interaction design role, it’s worth putting together a case study or two that shows how you approached a specific UX project and the outcomes you created. 

Bypass the UX job gatekeepers

The level of competition for junior level UX roles means that companies can prioritize applicants who already have demonstrated qualifications and experience in UX. But there are still ways to get jobs without having a lot of experience.

Two common ones are to transition into a UX role at your existing company or to get referred by someone who can vouch for your real-world skills despite your lack of paper qualifications. 

Applying for a UX job inside your organization allows you to bypass a lot of the recruitment process. It’s clear that you’re a suitable candidate for the company because you already work there. Now you just have to prove that you’re suitable for the role. If you’ve spent the time to get to know and even work with the UX team as part of the process of learning UX, they’ll be familiar with your knowledge and drive. 

Even if your current company isn’t your ideal place to work, getting UX experience in this way means that you’ll have a UX position on your resume when you start applying elsewhere.

If there isn’t a UX group in your current company, perhaps you can still start using the UX techniques you’ve learned in your current job. Taking a user-centered approach to pretty much any project is likely to result in better outcomes and will give you experience you can talk about in an interview and use for a portfolio case study. 

It’s also worth building relationships with UX people in other organizations. Pretty much every job I ever got, I was helped by someone I knew. Either through direct referral or by being able to mention their name in my cover letter.

The more these people know about your UX journey, the more likely it is that they can help you find a suitable position. If positions open up in their company, and (importantly) if they know enough about your background, you can ask them to refer you. This normally bypasses the initial resume sifting process and ensures that you’ll at least get considered for the position. 

So get to know people in the UX community. Go to conferences and meetups. Comment on other people’s posts if you have something to add or a (sensible, focused) question to ask. You can even form mentoring relationships if that seems like a suitable approach. 

Lastly, have you created an online presence in the UX space? Even as a novice UX-er, you have something to contribute. Posting about your experiences learning about UX, issues you faced using specific methods, and reviews of books or articles you’ve read can help you build a following and more importantly a reputation as someone who’s prepared to experiment and learn.    

Interview questions about your experience

If you've made it to the interview stage, the company is interested in you. Very few candidates check every box on the list of job requirements. If they did, they should be applying for a more advanced role that they can grow in to. Companies typically look for a set of core skills and then the aptitude to learn additional skills on the job. 

You already created a UX focus for your previous work experience. Remember to continue that through to the interview process. Read through the job description and then pick areas of your experience that match parts of that description, even if it’s from a completely different industry. 

For instance, you may not have designed games assets before, but what have you done that has been aimed at entertaining, educating or enabling people visually? 

You might not have development team experience, but where have you worked on multidisciplinary teams before? 

Take the time to write down the key points you’d want to hit as you describe how your experience matches each part of the job description.

Definitely don't lead with "I haven't done that before". Instead, show how you HAVE done it before, in a different setting. And by your tone, convince the interviewer that because you think it's a relevant comparison, they should think so too!

What should you do next?

If you’re currently employed in a large company, the first thing I would do is seek out the UX people in your organization. Take the time to find out how they work with other groups in the organization, and whether there's any way that you can partner with them while you are still in your current role. 

Even without the help of an existing UX team, there are lots of small things that you can integrate into your work on a daily basis. 

For instance, observing your users performing their tasks will give you insight into where their problems lie. Regardless of whether you’re on a development team or working in a customer-facing setting this will help you concentrate on fixing users' pain points. 

Getting your colleagues involved in UX activities like user observations, persona creation, and such like, is another way to practice UX techniques at the same time as you are learning them. If you let the team know that this is an experiment for you as much as it is for them, it can be a fun thing for you all to do. Your colleagues should also see the benefits that the UX techniques provide in terms of added clarity for your projects. 

You’ll notice that all of these suggestions are things you can do before you even apply for a UX job. At the same time, you can improve your chances in the job application process.

• Write down a list of the required skills you see in UX job postings. Rate your abilities for each skill and prioritize your learning.
• For skills you need to learn/improve, make a plan for how or from whom you will get that knowledge. 
• Edit every entry in the work history and education sections of your resume to highlight behaviors that are part of the broader UX job role.
• Wherever possible, describe the outcome. For instance, your workplace safety study led to 12 recommendations being implemented, resulting in a 40% drop in injuries. 

Above all, I’d say it’s important that you learn how to sell UX. You’ll be selling it to people you want to work with to gain experience. You’ll be selling it to your colleagues as you practice your skills. You’ll be selling it to people you interview with for UX jobs. As you develop the ability to sell the concept of UX, you’ll be simultaneously developing your understanding of the tools and techniques you’ll need in your UX career. 

Keep applying

There is a lot of interest in UX these days, and there is a lot of competition for the available openings. That means you'll need to be super-persistent. Just because you don't get a specific job, don't get disheartened. 

You need to know that recruiters aren't typically looking for the BEST person, they are looking for someone good enough to fill the role. That means they just stop sifting resumes after they reach a certain number of qualified candidates to take through to the next round. Your resume might just not have been in that initial set they looked at. So, if you want a job in UX, keep trying.