Jessica Greco is a newly-minted Senior User Experience Designer at Canvas. She has an MFA in Computer Art from School of Visual Arts, and her background spans fine art, psychology, web programming, and physical computing. She has fond childhood memories of organizing all her toys for fun.
She blogs occasionally, but you can always find her on Twitter at @grecasaurus
How to Outgrow Your Mid-Level Position
One of the hardest lessons to learn is that nobody is responsible for your career growth but you. If you feel stuck, bored, or are chafing at restrictions, it doesn’t mean someone needs to give you something else to do. It means you need to find what you want to be doing.
Are you ready for a new challenge? As a mid-level UXer, you should have solid research skills, client-facing experience, and at least some mobile experience. Missing one of those? I guess you know what to work on. If you have the trifecta, you’re probably recruiter catnip already.
It’s a buyer’s market for UX experts right now—tons of opportunities and not enough candidates. Make sure you’re the one leading your job hunt, not the one being led.
Research: yes, you really do need it.
You’ve decided that you’re leaving. Have you figured out what you’re looking for next? You could just go on whichever interview a recruiter tries to send you, but humor me for a minute. Not every company uses recruiters.A better approach is to come up with a list of criteria—”must-haves” and “nice to haves”, and a list of companies, and see who’s actively hiring.
Research companies that you’re interested in working for. Check out their respective Twitter feeds. This should provide some insight into company culture and priorities. Do they seem like the sort of people you’d like to work with?
Are they:
- Friendly?
- Interesting?
- Retweeting useful information?
- Barely maintained?
- Nonexistent?
Don’t underestimate the value of liking your coworkers.
Research comparable jobs. If you’re the type to take on more responsibilities as they become necessary, you may be working at a higher level than your title indicates. Apply those research skills to publicly available job descriptions and salary surveys. How does your experience compare? You may be surprised to find out you’re being underpaid. Check out the data on DesignSalaries.org for information to sink your teeth into.
Prioritize your needs and wants. Is money most crucial, or do you have some wiggle room? Is it more important to be part of a team, or to work on more diverse projects? Do you want to work more closely with developers? Are you focused on making new connections, so you can eventually go freelance? Do you want to be part of a growing team that can provide you with a future management position?
Be honest with yourself. What’s essential, and what’s just nice to have? What do you really want out of your future? Any indecision on your part will effect lackluster results. Try to articulate what you really want before you begin your job hunt.
UX Designers are made, not born.
As a UX Designer looking for a new position, hiring managers will have expectations of you. Your job is to try to understand these expectations, and then communicate your requirements.This is where all that research and thinking about what you want in your next position comes in handy. Now you have to prove yourself worthy.
What was your journey to becoming a UX designer?
Sell hiring managers your story. HCI and interaction design degrees are still a bit uncommon; it’s more likely that you’ll have some sort of convoluted explanation. Practice—this isn’t the sort of thing you should improvise. If you ramble on, it will reflect poorly. Working in the user experience field requires solid communication and organizational skills. Use them.
What is your process? Which part of the process do you enjoy the most?
This is a great opportunity to differentiate yourself from other applicants. Have you started learning more about content strategy to improve your work? Are you working on personal projects that involve more research than you have time for at your day job?
Don’t try and contort yourself into their idea of what a UX Designer does; it will sound fake. If you do bring something more to the table, make sure that you say so.
Evaluate the company.
A good interview is as much vetting the employer as being vetted yourself. As a UXer, you should be well-versed in ferreting out information. Apply these skills to the interview process—if you can’t ask valuable questions now, why would you be any better when you’re on the job?
Ask about their business structure, their current processes, what their meeting culture is like, what they do for fun, if they have any pets… anything to help you flesh out your mental model of that company.
Ask how siloed everyone’s roles are, and see if that structure meshes with what you previously decided you wanted. Siloing usually increases relative to the size of the company. Why is this important? If you really enjoy the full range of research through iteration, it would be a huge red flag to hear, “We have a separate strategy department, so we don’t do any of that nitty-gritty stuff.” That would be your cue to run like hell.
By engaging your interviewers on a level beyond an ordinary conversation, you uncover a more realistic picture of what it would be like to work there.
Stick to your guns.
If you previously decided you wanted a role as part of a team, conducting user research and iterating through designs, why are you considering completely unsuitable jobs that don’t meet your criteria? Stop it right now. Don’t let the interviewing process wear down your resolve—you’ll regret it.
Don’t forget to research yourself!
You’re in big trouble if all they find is some D-list actress of the same name, or some outdated high school sports statistics.Until recently, the primary Jessica Greco who existed in Google’s eyes was a D-list actress whose claim to fame was a crappy TV show with the woman from Baywatch. It takes time to fix this kind of neglect.
Here are some ideas:
- Start a Twitter feed. Microblogging is a great way to get involved with the community and share information and opinions. Yes, I know this stuff is indexed out there forever, but try not to let that paralyze you.
- Start blogging. I’m sure you have thoughts on trending topics in UX. Your point of view can’t just live in your head, you have to share your vision and your passion.
- Get your profile online. The goal is to eventually outrank all your internet doppelgängers on the first page of search results. Are you underwhelmed by your portfolio? Consider transitioning over to writing-heavy case studies, and talk about your decision-making process.
- Build your skillset. When you read job descriptions, make note of any skills you lack. While you are the one looking for a new job, the skills and knowledge you offer potential employers is the real focal point. Maybe it’s time for a personal improvement campaign to address any deficiencies. Read some books, take a class, swap skills with your friends, or start a personal project. There’s a reason autodidacts thrive in this industry.
Ask yourself if you’ve done enough to position yourself as a desirable hire for your next job. Don’t guilt yourself if the answer is no. Start with something small, and just keep going.
Design is not a zero-sum game.
Taking responsibility for your career development is crucial to success. Expand your public persona, develop your skills, and focus on making the best work you can. Look for opportunities to contribute more—at work and to the UX community at large. Design is not a zero-sum game; you should always be growing. If you’re not learning, you’re falling behind.
Not all UX jobs are created equal, but the same is true of designers. This variety can make job hunting much more challenging without a clear idea of what you want out of your future career. Don’t wait until you’re desperate to move on to start looking elsewhere—it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You owe it to yourself to be patient and to find the best fit possible.
Editor’s Note: Are you ready to move your UX career forward? Check out our listings for UX Jobs, and connect with our experts today!
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Onward Search was very excited to sponsor the inaugural Meetup event for Beers and Careers: Fairfield County Creatives this past week. Home to over 1800 advertising and marketing firms and nearly 8000 marketing professionals, Fairfield County is also home to Onward Search’s corporate headquarters, which made it the perfect opportunity to get our drink on and introduce ourselves to the area’s local marketing talent.
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Job growth, population, and education statistics have made the “Gold Coast of Connecticut” a thriving market for businesses and job seekers, so it’s no wonder that the community was so receptive to the group’s inception. Over 110 digital marketing and creative professionals attended the event, including art directors, web designers, social media marketing managers, SEO and web analysts.
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The launch party, held at Black Bear Saloon in South Norwalk, CT, acted purely as a social affair for new members to network, talk shop, kick around ideas for future gatherings, and of course throw down some beers. We were happy to supply the food and drinks for the evening and help encourage everyone’s creative juices by providing tons of flair for attendees to create their own nametags. Plenty of Instagram pictures were shared on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin!
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Emails and raving reviews of the evening’s events poured onto the Beers and Careers Meetup discussion board, the Facebook Group Page and the Linkedin Group :
Dear Angela, Jennifer and Matt,
Just wanted to say thank you once again to you and the whole Onward Search team for organizing the Beers and Careers Meetup last night.I had a great time, appreciated the complimentary beverages, and really enjoyed connecting with a few of the Fairfield creative folk.Onward Search rocks!Best,- WayneCopywriter/Content MarketerP.S. Will be sure to recommend Onward Search to all the key “Hire-and-fire” decision-makers that I know.
It was great and a lot of fun. Glad I was able to network a little and possibly find a job out of it.- Tami B
I’ve been to “freelance” mixers before, and they are generally full of out-of work freelancers looking for work. This one was completely different. I met Recruiters from Onward Search as well as other freelancers who weren’t so much out-of-work, but genuinely looking to meet other freelancers for networking purposed.- Robert S.
Due to the overwhelming success, Beers and Careers is looking forward to creating chapters in neighboring New York and Boston in the coming months! We’ll make sure to keep you updated so you can join us for a pint of your favorite beer and kick it with like-minded professionals in your community.
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Patrick Neeman is the Director of User Experience with Jobvite. Patrick runs the UX Drinking Game, and also runs a blog, Usability Counts, that covers topics such as User Experience, Social Media, and Web Marketing. His previous experience includes working with startups to launch their products, User Experience and Social Media consulting with Microsoft, and managing a team of 25 User Experience professionals for a technology consultancy. You can follow him on Twitter at @usabilitycounts.
Most hiring managers don’t understand the skills needed for great websites and web applications because the field is still relatively new. They understand that skilled designers can lead to amazing successes (read: they want to be like Apple), but they don’t grasp what the process is, for or which skillset they should be hiring. It’s not entirely their fault.
User Experience still isn’t well defined (think of our industry as television when color first came out) so it’s especially hard to come up with a job description that’s still being written. Even most college programs are still in flux, meaning that some degrees in the field aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written.
As a User Experience designer, you can help employers shape the jobs they advertise. Educate them, and you pay it forward for the designers of the future.
What’s the Lay of the Land?
During the interview process, ask a lot of questions:
- How many developers do you have?
- Do you have a visual designer?
- Is there a front-end coder?
- How big is the team?
- Is there a product manager?
- Have you had a UX designer before?
- What’s your development process?
- Is your team talking to the customers?
- Who’s writing the requirements?
- Are there requirements?
These questions give you clues about whether or not the organization has the right makeup for success, and whether you have the tools available to effect change. For example, if this is the first UX position among ten developers and the team lacks even a project manager, it probably won’t work.
Double down if a previous hire went sour. If they’ve had firsthand experience with one who’s spent two to three months there and couldn’t even deliver a wireframe, hiring managers become especially suspicious of people in the field.
Reach out to other people at the company through social media channels to get their assessment. This is a very effective way to find out if User Experience will work there, because you can make judgments on more than just the hiring manager’s viewpoint.
Does Your Skillset Fit?
Most hiring managers want people that fit into different-sized boxes. Do you fit?
I personally have a skillset typical of many User Experience Designers that work well in startups. I’m deep in User Experience, but can also do prototyping, some visual design and a bit of programming. That makes my skillset very valuable with smaller teams, but it may not match the needs of places that want specialists, because I might not be deep in an area they need, like taxonomy.
No one would confuse me with Jared Spool, who has a completely different skillset. With his extensive and very specialized experience in user research, his background works very well for large corporations that are trying to solve huge problems. We both claim User Experience as our passion, but neither of us would fit in the same box.
Assess what you can do realistically, and ask yourself if you’re a fit for the job. What you bring to the table — for example, whether you specialize or are you a generalist — can be more or less valuable depending on the company’s needs.
Are You Flexible in What You Can Contribute?
I did a presentation recently with Dylan Campbell about getting a great UX Job. One of the key comments was: “While you feel you don’t have to know how to code, JavaScript developers are here at the event leaning about User Experience. That makes them more valuable than you.”
Employers want flexible people. Specialists are great for specific tasks, but the resource and skill set needs of any business change with each software development life cycle.
You should change with them.
That might mean learning a new skill, or reacquainting yourself with skills you haven’t used in a while. You have to sell yourself as a great resource that can grow, learn and expand your knowledge with the company – that alone will allow you to shape your new UX Job, and, by extension, your career.
Do You Have the Skills to Teach Them?
The reality of User Experience is that even though how you apply your process changes with each organization, the tools of User Experience don’t change. And it’s up to you to decide if you have enough experience to effectively guide them.
But it’s just not about the hard skills, such as knowing how to do personas or the basics of ethnographic research. The soft skills, such as how to negotiate the politics of a organization learning about the User Experience process, are equally as important.
Three soft-skills questions you should ask yourself:
- Can you handle the political nature of the company?
- Do you have an aptitude to educate coworkers?
- Do you have patience?
The best way to build an organization dedicated to design is by building credibility. This takes a lot of time and the ability to build support with the right people in a culture.
Are They Flexible in What They Can Learn?
This is hard, because it requires “Spidey sense”. Ask yourself these questions:
- Can they learn what user experience is about, and how user experience can translate to success in their organization?
- Can they make the hard decisions that will enable you to instill a process that will produce great products?
- Are the developers going to allow change?
- Has User Experience failed them in the past?
And the most important question:
- Is there someone (hopefully the hiring manager) that will champion User Experience in the organization?
Great organizations have that, and that’s the only way User Experience succeeds. Design-driven organizations need dedication at the top to make it work (read: Apple).
It’s not easy.
Even the largest agencies in the world are having issues in adopting a focus on User Experience into their company culture. Great organizations have leaders that are flexible enough to know that what they’re doing isn’t working and are willing to adapt. Businesses need a certain level of maturity to succeed at User Experience, and you have to decide whether or not they’re at that level.
If they’re hiring you to solve a problem and you feel it can be solved, make a go at it. If not, it’s okay to say, “Let’s be friends.” They may call you in as a consultant later if a previous resource didn’t work out.
The Bottom Line: You Can Shape Your Future.
User Experience can be shaped more than any other position in the organization because the field is still evolving.
It’s up to you to shape it.
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