Finding your next UX role
New year, new job?
Ladies That UX has you covered with its annual January careers event, held in London in collaboration with digital recruitment specialists Zebra People.
This year’s event was split into 3 parts: Service Design or Research workshop, CV / Portfolio review and Interview Task practice.
UX career options: Service Design or Research
UX professionals are highly in demand as our field continues to grow. But as UX involves many different skills, there are many directions your career can take. Your future dream job may involve wearing multiple hats or becoming a specialist. How do you know what direction to take? Finding a mentor who has followed your chosen career path is a great place to start. Two workshops with experienced practitioners offered insights into how to shape your career in two exciting specialist areas of UX.
Alberta Soranzo, End-to-End Service Design & Systems Thinking Director at Lloyds Banking Group, talked about what Service Design is and how it adds value to organisations. Could you be a service designer? If you take a holistic view of experiences, and are less focused on the pixel perfect detail, it might be the job for you!
Amanda Roach, User Experience Researcher at the Ministry of Justice offered advice and tips for a career in Research. Could you be a user researcher? If you are intrinsically motivated by understanding the ways that people behave and think, it might be the job for you!
Learning about the key methods of service design and user research will also help you become a better all round UX professional. Follow Alberta and Amanda to stay updated.
CV / Portfolio review
It is a truth universally acknowledged that most UX jobs require you to submit both a cv and a portfolio with examples of your work. Yet designing your cv and portfolio can be a daunting task, even if you are a designer! Apply User-Centred Design to the challenge by following these top tips from Zebra People.
When designing your cv:
- Understand your users — typically hiring managers, HR teams and recruiters — and research their needs
- Follow conventions in format — PDF or Word formats can be read by most job sites — and use keywords appropriate to your search
- Make text easy to scan with bullet points — your personas are typically time-poor and inundated with applications
- User test — collect feedback and iterate
When creating a portfolio:
- Make it individual and personal — show who you are as a designer
- Quality, not quantity — pick a small number of case studies that represent how you work
- Tell the story — what problem did you solve, what methods were used and what was the outcome?
- If you haven’t had a UX job yet, use personal projects to show you can apply UX thinking
Interview task practice
If you are interviewed for a UX job, you may be asked to complete a task to showcase your skills. Kate Flood and Adelaide Lee from the UX team at Sky offered a chance to practice with an example task about voice control TV. Participants had a short time to prepare their response to the brief and present back to the group.
Interview tasks should be fairly simple and possible to complete within a designated timeframe. Whatever the brief is, be sure to follow instructions carefully and show your working. If information you need is lacking, asking questions is a good way to show your interviewers you are thinking about the problem. Perhaps you need to re-frame the problem, as we often do in UX. Most tasks are aimed at identifying what you would be like to work with, so try to showcase your natural style. Find great examples of design tasks to practice here.
Final piece of interview advice — relax and breath!
