PART 3
UX lessons I wish I had learned earlier: Job Searching
They say “hindsight is 20/20”. It’s very true. 10 years ago I made the switch from graphic design to user experience after a 10 year stint working for print shops & manufacturing environments. It has been an incredible journey so far, but there are many things I wished I had learned earlier than I did. These are the top 30. I share them with you in the hope that you can avoid many pitfalls I encountered along the way and become even more effective at improving users’ lives than I am. For when any one of us improves, we all win.
I have broken these lessons into 3 categories: Craft, Working With Stakeholders, and Job Searching. There are 10 lessons in each category. In this article, I will focus on Job Searching.
LESSON #21: Everyone struggles with job searching.
I remember being super frustrated looking for my first UX job. I sent in dozens of applications (over a hundred), had an application rejection rate approaching 95% and bombed every interview I got—and that was with 10 years of graphic design experience and formal training in UX at a time when UX training was rare. When I finally got hired for my first UX job, I was studying for the GRE & GMAT to continue on to Business school instead. I get it. It’s painful.
BUT…
One mistaken idea many new designers have is a variation on the “grass is greener on the other side” idea. They think that “If I can just get some experience under my belt…” or “If I can just make Senior…”, then job searching will be easier. While it can get a little easier the more you interview and as you build up experience, the simple fact of life is that job searching sucks…for everyone.
That said, there are ways I’ve learned that can help it suck less. That’s what all the lessons to follow are about, but if there is a silver bullet that can allow you to lose a job 1 day and start a new dream job 2 weeks later, I haven’t found it.
A lot of the key here is to realize that it simply takes time. Just like UX Design work itself. You wouldn’t expect to design an entire complex software application in 1 day and have it accomplish any meaningful results. The same is true of job searching.
While we’re on this topic, I’d also like to say a word about the other side of the table. We hiring managers are just as nervous as candidates going into interviews. We get frustrated that our roles take longer to fill than we’d like. We want to find someone great. We want candidates to like our company. We want them to have a good experience. We want to come across as human, empathetic, and real. We worry if the questions we ask are the best way to find the best candidates. Sometimes we interviewers pretend like we have all the answers and are judging the candidates worthiness to work at our company…but that is just a façade. We really just want to have a 2-way conversation and find the best mutual fit. Not all hiring managers would admit but most of us feel that way. So relax a bit and know that you’re not the only one who is nervous or frustrated.
That said, there are things you can do to make your job search more effective (even if it still ends up taking longer than you’d like). To learn more about the lessons I’ve learned in my 20+ years of job searching on making it as effective as possible, keep reading.
LESSON #22: Personal branding is vital.
If you want to lessen the pain of job searching, you have to put your branding hat on. Personal branding is nothing more than being intentional about what you want people to understand about what makes you unique. What is your ‘brand promise’? What is your ‘anti-brand’?
As Jeff Gothelf puts it in his book Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You:
“Luck happens when opportunity meets preparation.”
Personal branding is the regular, ongoing effort of doing the preparation so you attract the right opportunities & companies and drive the wrong ones away. Yes, you read that right. You actually want to drive the wrong companies & opportunities away.
A couple quick examples. One of my most valued connections & friends (the very talented Mike Curtis) I met because of personal branding. He was teaching at the UX bootcamp Dev Mountain at the time and was looking for some experience designers and design leaders to come to answer questions during a special Q&A event. He posted on a Slack channel we both happened to be a part of, & I replied that I would be willing to come if he still needed people. The way he tells it, before replying to me he checked out my LinkedIn, he read a couple articles I had written, etc. He could immediately tell that I would be a good fit for the questions many of the students had. Because I had been working on my personal branding and getting my ideas out in the open, he was able to tell that I was a fit.
P.S. If you want a fantastic example of personal branding, go check out Mike’s own work at https://mikewcurtis.medium.com/.
Let me share one other example. Over a period of 3 years, I had been searching for a UX leadership role at a Fortune 500 company. I interviewed at Facebook, Google (twice), Dropbox, Intuit, Honeywell, The Home Depot (twice), USAA, Adobe, LinkedIn, Philips, Amazon, Dell, IBM, and American Airlines. At many of these companies I made it to the last round only to have it not work out in the end. I was becoming quite frustrated.
Then one day, a friend I had known when I lived in Brazil 20 years ago (who was a Director of UX at Target) messaged me telling me that he had read my article “Business for Designers” and had used it as the material of a session with his team only to realize after the fact that he knew the author! He then reached out to me to let me know that he had shared my profile with one of his counterparts who was looking to hire a Sr. UX Manager and asked if I’d be open to having a conversation. I was, and the rest is history. I have a job I love at Target & as of the writing of this article, I am the only Sr. UX Manager to ever be hired externally. I say that not to boast, but to show the power of personal branding. I sincerely doubt, that had I simply applied for the role out of the blue, that I would have been selected for an interview.
Now, I want to be careful that you don’t misunderstand. I have been working on personal branding for years (and there are admittedly others who are much better at it than I). Just like networking, it doesn’t work overnight. You have to continually iterate, get feedback, and continue to build your voice. However, if you will dedicate yourself to it, I can promise you that somehow, someday you will see results from it, and the fantastic thing is that it’s not just about getting a new job. It can help you immensely at your current job as well. (I recently had a couple candidates tell me they applied for a job I’m hiring for simply because some of my content really resonated with them.) It can help you get promotions, can help you be viewed as a leader within your organization, it can open doors for speaking engagements and much, much more.
If you’re like I was when I first became enamored with the idea of personal branding, you’re excited to get started but might not know how. Here are a few resources I would highly recommend to give you a boost:
- The Crazy One podcast by Stephen Gates (especially episodes 6 & 7)
- Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You by Jeff Gothelf (book)
- 10 Golden Rules of Personal Branding by Goldie Chan (article)
- The Definitive Guide to Personal Branding (article & website)
LESSON #23: Use the UX process on your resume & portfolio.
I went far too long without using the UX process on my own resume and portfolio. You would be shocked at how many of us designers make that mistake. It is by far the biggest and most common mistake I see with both portfolios and resumes when hiring for UX roles.
I still remember watching a talk (way later in my UX career than I’d like to admit) on the topic and it hitting me like a ton of bricks. I wasn’t doing discovery & research. I wasn’t considering who the target audience of my resume and portfolio were. I wasn’t learning about their circumstances. I wasn’t iterating. I wasn’t testing. I wasn’t problem solving. I had no idea what the difference was between what a sourcer, recruiter, & hiring manager look for. I didn’t know how their motivations differed. I do now, and it’s made all the difference in the world.
If you aren’t using the UX process on your resume and portfolio, you are shooting yourself in the foot before you even begin the race. We know how to effectively solve problems. We know how to research. We know how to iterate and test and iterate some more, but often we don’t use those skills on our own portfolio — and even less of us do it with our resume.
If you fall into this bucket, stop what you’re doing and start using the UX process on the “product of you” today. This one thing alone will have enormous impact on your ability to get interviews at companies at which you want to work.
Why is this such a big deal? Most resumes & portfolios look identical. They read identical. Their creators “UX Process” is identical. You could literally swap one name for another and most portfolios and resumes would remain 90% accurate. When you take personal branding serious, however, your marketing becomes personal to you. It can’t be duplicated. When a hiring manager comes across a resume or portfolio like that, it’s an instant interview.
LESSON #24: Be strategic about case studies both in your portfolio & in interviews.
I struggled for a LONG time with portfolio reviews during interviews. I knew how UX hiring managers like to understand the how & why behind the what, but the problem I struggled with is how to take a 6–9 month project and summarize the what, how, & why into just a few minute summary. I almost always ended up sharing too much info and going over the allotted time. It not only was long, it was ineffective. Invariably, trying to cover too much resulted in running out of time to cover (or bring desired emphasis) to more important topics.
Through the kindness of trusted confidants, experimentation, and a tireless determination to become better at interviewing & job seeking, there are 3 key pieces of advice I’d share if you feel like you get interviews but are struggling to land the jobs you really want.
1. Be strategic & focus on what you want an interviewer’s or portfolio viewer’s key takeaways to be.
So many of us take a chronological approach to presenting case studies. Often we even try to teach the reader/interviewer about the UX process along the way. Nearly everyone writes or presents case studies this way. The problem is that this is like hunting a duck with a machine gun, yet the vast majority of designers still do it.
Go rewatch a presentation from your favorite UX leader. They have a specific agenda — specific takeaways — in mind. Yes, they do share some background information and because great presenters use storytelling to make their presentations so it can feel chronological, but if you analyze those presentations closely you will find that they follow the rule of 3.
“Divide your message into three chunks. What are the benefits of your service? What are the main things you want the audience to walk away remembering? Most people don’t have the memory (or attention) to remember five or six main points; however, three is a number we are uniquely attuned to recall.
Steve Jobs was famous for using the Rule of Three in his presentations. In 2011, he described the iPad 2 as “thinner, lighter, and faster” than the first. These three adjectives were massively effective; they said everything the audience needed to know. It was much more successful than if he had announced ‘20 ways the iPad 2 is different from its predecessor.’”
— Scott Schwertly, “The Rule of Three for Presentations”
One thing that dramatically helped me improve my case study effectiveness in interviews was to break up the main idea I wanted to convey to my audience from each case study into 3 main points. Often this consisted of three key results we achieved, or 3 main skills this case study highlighted (catered to skills I know from my research that the employer is looking for). Then, tell the story of the project from that point of view. If it doesn’t prove one of your main 3 points, don’t share it.
For example, if one of my points were focused on showing the value of discovery research and how my insistence on including engineers in the research saved our project, I might say something like the following:
“On one project I worked on, we were trying to improve the amount of jobs that could be done the same day they were assigned. From a prior user interview we learned that we didn’t know as much about the users circumstances as we previously thought, so it was clear we needed to do a little observation. I insisted on bringing one of our senior engineers with me. This was met with a little hesitation, but I was able to make it happen.
During one of our ride alongs with a service worker, we learned that a particular field we were basing our scheduling algorithm on was almost always wrong and could not be relied upon. This was a connection only the engineer (with his knowledge of the code base) could have made. We also learned many other things that day that ended up resulting in not only a better user experience, but in achieving the business goal much more completely.
Had we not done the research and had the engineer not been present, our project almost certainly would have failed to increase same day jobs. As a result of our taking time to research, we saw an increase of same-day jobs by 37%.”
Notice that I only told enough of the story for them to understand the problem we were solving, prove my point, and what the result ended up being. It was focused on what I wanted the takeaway to be. Not a travel log.
2. Use the Star Method.
I discovered the Star Method many years ago when I was interviewing with a couple Fortune 50 companies who recommended it as part of their interview coaching sessions. It has been a game changer for me. I used to really struggle with how to summarize case studies of my work. Hiring managers wanted to understand “the messy middle” but I found that when I went into the messy middle there was just too much to cover. I almost always took longer than the time allotted. I’m certain I also bored my interviewers to death.
If you find yourself in a similar boat, I’d highly encourage you to give the Star Method a try. It has drastically helped me focus and narrow in on the most relevant details without sacrificing details on “the messy middle”.
You can check out this article for more details, but the basic idea is that you summarize your project into a 4-point arc using only 1–2 sentences per section. The outline goes like this:
- SITUATION — set the stage. Give any basic background information needed to understand the context.
- TASK—describe the problem you set out to solve and what your goal was in the situation.
- ACTION—what action you took to solve the problem. What are the most important takeaways from the “messy middle” for this audience to understand.
- RESULT—what results came from this project? Quantifiable metrics are great here. This is also a great place to summarize cultural impacts your work had.
You will not get it perfect at first. In fact, you will likely find that even trying to summarize, you will likely have a difficult time distilling each section into 1–2 sentences. Keep at it, though, and you will get much better. I’d recommend when you first start using the STAR method, to first write it down and practice reading it out loud. Do NOT just wing it as tempting as that might be. You need this to be second nature.
For example, here is an example of one of my first attempts:
Situation
In my previous role, I was put in charge of working with a strategic partner to add support for a new kind of towing job to our web & mobile dispatching platform.Task
The goal was to help them increase the number of “same day” tows so they could better deliver on their Service-Level Agreements. As part of the request, we were asked to include their 93-step inventory form in our mobile app for the drivers to fill out before picking up each vehicle.Action
I was concerned by the user experience ramifications this would introduce into our app so I scheduled an onsite visit for myself and one of our Senior Technical Architects to ride along with a few tow truck drivers and observe the process from beginning to end.On these ride alongs, we made 2 key observations:
1. The inventory being filled out by drivers accounted for about 60% of the total time at a job site.
2. The lot attendants filled out the exact same inventory after the vehicle was delivered that the tow truck driver had just filled out.When I inquired of our partner as to why they were asking for the inventory to be filled out twice, they responded that they wanted to make sure vehicles didn’t get damaged during loading/transport to the tow yard.
Result
Armed with this knowledge, I proposed that we solve their problem through adding damage reporting onto our robust photo-taking which already had geo-tagging capability. This would allow them to determine if additional damage had been caused en route without requiring drivers to spend an extra 5–7 minutes filling out a duplicate inventory. They agreed, upon the condition that we add 5 inventory fields that were important to be collected at the scene. Naturally we agreed. 5 is much better than 93.This not only improved the user-experience of the tow truck drivers, but also resulted in:
• 23% increase in same day tows.
• Reduction in average pickup time from 9 minutes to under 4.
• Improved data accuracy and reporting.The key was to show how eliminating frustration of the mobile app users would also help the Company achieve the outcome the business was already focused on. This would not have been possible without user research.
As you notice, 2 of the sections are much longer than 1–2 sentences. Still, I could clearly describe the situation, task, action, and result in just a few short minutes. This was a MAJOR improvement over prior attempts. As you get used to describing projects in this way, it will get much easier.
3. Make the key takeaways really easy to find.
Once you have your key takeaways defined, make them REALLY easy to find. This includes your resume & portfolio in addition to interview answers.
One way I’ve found extremely valuable to do this is to summarize case studies using the STAR method on your portfolio. To see an example, check out my portfolio landing page. On my resume, I strip this down to a summary of “Task” & “Results” sections of key projects. An example of this can also be seen on my portfolio site.
Since I took that approach I have received LOTS of compliments from recruiters. Many don’t even click through to the detailed case studies. (They get all the information they need to want to interview me just from the landing page). My application to interview ratio has skyrocketed since I took this approach. Summarizing succinctly and calling out results you achieved makes recruiters and hiring managers want to speak with you (which is the one and only goal of a portfolio or resume.)
4. Choose the right length, for the right situation.
Recruiters and hiring managers are extremely busy people. They don’t have time to read a 10 to 20 minute case study. Accordingly you need to help them find the most relevant information in the least amount of time.
All use cases of a case study are not made equal, either. There are 3 main reasons someone would review your portfolio. It is important to understand and address each one.
- IS THIS PERSON WORTH LEARNING ABOUT?
When a sourcer, recruiter, or hiring manager is screening resumes and portfolios, they are essentially just scanning quickly to determine if you are a good enough fit to justify more than a 10-second glance. You need to grab their interest quickly and help them find the most relevant case study to review. - IS THIS PERSON WORTH INTERVIEWING?
Once you have convinced them to actually read a case study, they likely are only going to skim it. At this stage their question revolves around whether you will be someone worth talking to and/or presenting to the hiring manager. Do you have relevant experience? Do you know how to solve problems? Do you understand before you solve, etc. Do you have relevant or comparable experience? If they can find the answer to these questions quickly by skimming, you are very likely to get an interview. - IS THIS PERSON WORTH HIRING?
You have already proven yourself a good enough fit to interview. Most likely at this stage the hiring manager is taking a 2nd look at your portfolio to look for evidence of how great a fit you would be (almost certainly after having spoken with you). They are probably trying to decide between 2 great candidates and reviewing the case study you presented for a final time. This is where they DO care about details. Maybe something was unclear from the interviews and they are looking for evidence that you’re the right one to hire.
To be the most successful, you need to attract the right employers. To do that you need to provide a good experience for users of all 3 of these use cases. I have found that the best way to do that is to deliver a 10-second, 1-minute, and 10-minute experience.
Your 10 second experience should focus on grabbing their interest quickly and make them want to learn more. To do this, you need to answer the question: “Why should I care” or “How will this person help me solve my company’s problems.
Your 1 minute experience should focus on landing the interview. Here your goal is making your case study scannable. You can assume they’ve already decided which case study they want to review. If someone spends 60 seconds scanning your case study, will they get the takeaways you want them to? (Hint: this is worth user testing).
Your 10-minute experience is what most of us typically focus on when writing case studies. The key here is to focus on including ONLY the detail needed to convey the details of your KEY TAKEAWAYS. Think of this as a more in-depth, show-and-tell version of your 10 second “STAR Method” summary. Resist the temptation to make this a chronological diary of everything you did on the project. Your 10-minute case study experience should still revolve around 3–4 key takeaways from your project. Leave them wanting to learn more.
LESSON #25: Networking always trumps ‘apply and wait’.
The harsh reality is that you have less than a 2% chance of landing an interview, and less than a 0.1% chance of actually landing the job if all you do is apply online and wait. You need to do more.
This is why — at the bare minimum — you have to get your application in front of a human’s eyes via networking. If you can get someone at the company to follow up with a recruiter or hiring manager and ask them to check the system for a particular application, your chances go up dramatically. If you can actually secure a referral from someone at the company your chances go up even more.
NOTE: it should be noted, however, that blindly sending a message to someone you’ve never met or talked with is NOT networking and will not increase your chances much. If you want the reap the benefits networking can give, you have to be willing to put in the work to get to know others, have stimulating conversations, do what you can to help them along their journey, etc.
That said, you may not have a deep connection or have worked closely with someone who works at the company you are interested in. What do you do then?
One of my favorite approaches in this scenario is to find someone in the local design community or in your LinkedIn network who works at the company (or who knows someone who works at the company) you are interested in. Again, make sure they actually know who you are or at least have interacted with you enough to recognize you. (No cold contacts). Then you send them a message similar to this:
Hi __________,
I saw [company] is hiring for a [insert job req ID or URL to job posting]. I’m very interested in the role and sent in my application. I know that [company] likely gets hundreds of applications for jobs like this, so I was curious if you would be willing to reach out to the recruiting team or hiring manager to make them aware of my application?
I recognize that we haven’t worked together closely yet, so you probably can’t provide an actual referral, but would you at least be willing to help me get my resume & portfolio in front of a human?
If you wouldn’t mind, I would greatly appreciate your help.
I have had very, very few people turn down a request like this, and it makes a WORLD of difference. It could be the difference between your application getting screened out (or worse, never even reviewed), and being called in for an interview.
If you want to take your effectiveness to an even greater level, my recommendation is that you forget about optimizing your resume for computers altogether and optimize it for the user experience of reading a resume (then use the above process to get it in front of a human). Ever since I’ve taken this approach, my interview to application rate has been well over 60% (4X what it was before).
I have written about UX-centered resumes before so I won’t rehash all the points here, but if you’re interested to learn about my approach and why it is so effective, check out my article A Case for Human-Centered Resumes.
LESSON #26: When looking for a job, don’t settle. Period.
Probably the biggest mistake I’ve made in my career so far is settling for any job I can land. I get it. There are situations where you feel desperate for anything. I’ve been there, too. I’ve been burned out. I’ve been laid off and without work while my family depended on me to provide for them (twice). I’ve worked in toxic environments where my health, sanity, and even my family relationships were affected. I’ve worked for companies that I loved but where progression toward my career goals came to a complete halt.
I have settled for roles I knew would not be a fit (more than once) due to these circumstances. Yet, something I have learned through all of these experiences is that it is never worth it.
We talk a lot in this industry about “Personal Branding”. Sometimes we make it out to be this magic solution that will help you attract your dream companies…and it does have that potential. However, perhaps one of the biggest Job Seeking lessons I’ve learned the hard way is that if you want to attract your dream companies, you have to be willing to say “no” to the wrong ones. You have to have a Career Vision and drive towards it. You have to know what the milestones should be. Then you have to say NO to everything else.
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”
— Steve Jobs
Over the last 20 years I’ve been a designer and design leader, I’ve learned that if you really want to be happy, fulfilled, successful (whatever that means to you), and progressing towards your goals, you have to be relentless in not settling.
I know I’m not the only one that has this problem. I talk to designers all the time who have no idea what their career goals even are. When they look for a job, it’s basically “whichever company will hire me first for a good salary”. If you take that approach for too long, it can actually destroy your career prospects.
If you’re too early in your career to know what you’re long term career goals are, that’s fine. But make a decision on something new you’d like to learn, industry you’d like to explore, or experience you’d like to gain and go after that. You can also focus on the kind of manager or company size or role you’d like and go after it.
As you gain more experience, be intentional about your career goals even if they’re currently out of reach. For example, my career vision is to join a vision-driven, mid-size software company with an already established UX team and help scale their design practice (and company). Until recently, I worked mainly for small companies. I had never worked anywhere with more designers than 5 and much of the time I was the sole designer. When I became a UX leader, I was mostly leading small teams.
Who would hire someone with experience leading only small teams to help scale their design practice? It would be tough. Anyone hiring a VP of UX to scale their design org would want someone who had worked at a large company. About a year ago, I was working with a company I loved but where I was unlikely to get the kind of experience I needed to achieve my career goals. I loved my boss. I loved my coworkers. I loved the problems we were solving. I love our executive team. But it would have been years before I started gaining the kind of experience I need to achieve my career goals.
So when the opportunity arose to join Target, I jumped on it. While I was casually looking for something more aligned with my career goals I had many opportunities come up. Some even were to join companies I had a lot of respect for. Yet none of them would put me in any better spot to achieve my career goals in the future. So I turned them down.
Now I’m working for an incredible company with an inspiring vision, and am learning from amazing fellow design practitioners and leaders. It took me quite a while to find the right opportunity, but I finally did because I stopped settling.
LESSON #27: Job rejections are not (usually) about you.
One of the major lessons I wish I had understood better earlier on in my career was that job rejections are most frequently NOT about you. When you’re on the receiving end of a rejection, it seems personal—especially when you feel like you were perfect for the role. If you’re like me, you can even start to feel a sense of Imposter Syndrome after a few rejections.
Yet, I’ve been on the other side of the table long enough now to realize that when they tell you there was a candidate that was a better fit, that’s usually not a lie. Even if you seem like a fantastic candidate, there might be someone who is a better fit. My experience has been that when we hear “better fit” most of us think “more talented” when that is almost always not the case (especially if you make it to the final round).
I get it. Rejection is hard and immensely frustrating. I made it to the final round (flew out of state to interview) with Fortune 100 companies 12 times before being hired by Target. In almost every case I thought I was a great candidate. My background seemed to be the perfect fit…but it wasn’t from their perspective.
Then came Target. I not only got the job, but I am the first (and as of the time of writing, the only) UX leader to ever be hired from the outside at Target. I’ve worked here for almost a year and am still humbled by that fact. Yet, after joining I could see exactly why my unique combination of experience and skills were perfect for this role and team. I don’t tell you this to boast (part of me still doesn’t believe it), but to show that the reason I was hired here and wasn’t hired at all those other great companies came down to the right combination of experience and passion.
So, yes, work on your interviewing skills, your portfolio, your craft, your soft skills, etc., but if you don’t get the job PLEASE don’t get down on yourself. Don’t question your worth. Don’t give up. Keep going. Keep searching and don’t settle. You will find the role for which you’re the ideal fit, too.
LESSON #28: Show how you learn, not only how you solve.
Jared M. Spool wrote a fantastic article on this here, but one huge mistake many of us make early in our careers is that we don’t showcase how we learn in our portfolios. We often want to come across as more knowledgable than we are, but this is a mistake. Here’s an excerpt from Jared’s great article on the topic:
A mistake I see folks make is when they focus on the designs they’ve created. For UX professionals just starting out, these are school or side projects. For folks looking for their next job, they are the work projects from their first or second position.
Don’t get me wrong. When I look at these things, they always look great. As far as I can tell, they work great. They are good, solid designs.
However, that’s not what smart hiring managers care about.
What’s preventing them from getting that gig or interview is that the hiring managers can’t see their vector of growth. The vector of growth tells a hiring manager how they’re progressing at growing into an amazing UX professional.
You see, these early-career folks are not telling their story right. The hiring manager doesn’t care about their designs, because, let’s face it, those designs aren’t that impressive.
If they won’t impress managers with their designs, what will impress them? The answer: How they learned to do those designs.
—Jared Spool
The reason for this is that when I’m interviewing someone, I am looking for evidence that they can and will solve the problems I and my team are facing (not the problems they solved at their previous company). In a senior-level designer I look for comparable experience of what they’ve done in the past. With someone early in their career, though, that’s harder to do. So I get that confidence that they can succeed through seeing how you approached a situation where you didn’t know what to do and how you got unstuck and what you learned from the experience.
Having the confidence that you can learn, progress, and grow both on your own and with mentoring is vital. Showing how you learn and what you would do better next time also shows humility and an eagerness to continually improve.
So if you aren’t already showcasing how you learn and what you would do differently next time, you are shooting yourself in the foot.
LESSON #29: ‘Making senior (or manager, etc)’ too soon can actually harm your career.
This is a tough one to hear. Your natural reaction will be to resist it. We all have career goals and aspirations. Getting promoted is a feeling of validation. It feels good. For many, having that “Senior” title feels like they’ve finally joined the ranks of “top talent”. This is a flavor of “Imposter Syndrome” that is opposite of what we normally think of. It’s the idea that you “deserve” a title or responsibilities you truly are not ready for.
Yet progressing too fast can actually harm you in the long term. This is especially true if you work at a small company. No matter how strong the temptation, do not take an inflated title. It takes time to muster the experience necessary to earn promotions.
So what is the harm? How does this actually hold you back? If someone is willing to give me a Senior or Director title, shouldn’t I take it?
The biggest problem with taking a title you haven’t yet earned is that if you are let go for whatever reason, it can make it hard to find another job. Based on your resume, people will think you perform at that same level, but when they interview you they will be able to tell that you’re not actually experienced enough for that level (so you won’t land the job). I’ve seen this happen countless times, and it’s very sad.
TO BE CLEAR: I am NOT saying you shouldn’t take a role that will cause you to stretch. That is how we all grow. What I AM saying is to forget about the title. Most promotions come when you have proven that you can do the work at the level. For example, if you are a mid-level designer and are influencing stakeholders, mentoring younger designers, taking on (and delivering great results) on very complex projects, and evangelizing UX across your company, then you are very likely to be promoted. You have earned that title.
On the flip side, it takes time to learn enough to be able to perform well at that level. Another quote from Jared Spool:
It takes years to learn how to produce impressive work. [Early career UXers] haven’t put in those years of hard work yet. They will. I have every confidence that they will. Just like I have every confidence you will. Someday.
— Jared Spool
It really isn’t about the # of years. Some progress faster than others. Not all “years of experience” are equal. Yet, you can’t progress from bootcamp-grad to UX Director in just a couple years. You need the experience of seeing different approaches, of experimenting and failing, and of succeeding to give you the experience to draw from to do the work of a Senior, Lead, Manager, or Director. Until you actually have that experience, taking one of those titles will do you more harm than good.
So what should you do instead?
I have 3 recommendations:
- Focus on the work. Forget about the titles. Focus on the work and delivering exceptional outcomes. Too often, we UXers focus on titles or how impressive our portfolio will be instead of actually improving users’ lives. If you focus on delivering exceptional outcomes, and increasing the UX Maturity of your company, the titles and recognition will come.
- Identify the Why. Challenge yourself to sit down and define why you want a higher title. Be honest with yourself. Is it really about the title? Or are there other reasons? Do you want more flexibility, scope, or autonomy than you now have? Do you want to mentor others more, or influence strategy? Is it more pay? Depending on the answer to those questions, there may actually be other ways to achieve those goals without waiting for a new title. Plus, the kind of self-awareness that comes from an exercise like this will only add to your experience and ability to perform the duties of higher level roles in the future.
- Learn & Imitate. Learn what skills, experience, and responsibilities those at the next level typically have and seek out opportunities to develop those skills. Ask your leader. Review job descriptions of higher-level roles. Curate a list of things you can be doing now to become a Lead rather than just asking for the title. Ask to sit in as an observer on interviews for higher level roles. Then develop the skills you see demonstrated.
LESSON #30: Pay it forward
Probably one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my career is to Pay It Forward. Everyone has something they can do to help others. Even if you’re in your first UX job you can help others looking to break into the field. Everyone has something to give and everyone has something to learn.
Sure Jeremy, you say, I get that’s important, but why is it a “Job Seeking” lesson? Great question. I’m glad you asked.
Call it Karma, blessings from a higher power, or what you will, but I have found that those who help others just naturally have good things come to them. People remember how you treated them, and when a need arises for which you could be a good fit they are more likely to remember you if you were kind & helped them along their path.
The irony of this concept is that if you help someone because you want something in return, you are almost certain to not receive any return, but if you develop a habit of paying it forward and helping others along their path to repay some small measure of those that helped you, someday somehow you will receive it back when you’re least expecting it. This is the purest essence of networking which as stated earlier is the most effective way to job seek.
Plus, it’s just the right thing to do. Be the kind of person that sends the elevator back down.
Have something to add? Please leave a comment on the article or hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter. Need a UX Leader to help guide your company’s UX Maturity? Need a speaker for your event? Check out my portfolio or contact me.
