HOW TO BREAK INTO UX
Your background is your greatest strength: Crafting your story
"My background isn't in UX, so how do I appeal to hiring managers for UX positions?" The answer isn't what you expect: don't ignore it. Your background gives you a unique perspective on the world that only you can offer your potential employer. Celebrate it.
New year, new job? The end of the year holiday is a great time to reevaluate our lives and to make changes for the future. My friends in HR know this as well and that's why you'll typically see new jobs coming out at the beginning of the year.
So, you're ready to make some changes… what next? My last article, Standing out from the crowd, offers a great starting point. But what if your educational background or work experience isn't in the area that you want to get into? How do you shift gears to start working in a new field?
When reviewing resumes, I've seen attempts to hide a background in something perceived to be unrelated-deleting experience or glossing over it as non-relevant. For some reason, people feel ashamed that they haven't spent their entire life focused on a single thing.
This is not the best way to approach your past experiences. Your background experiences are yours and only yours. What's the secret to telling your story?
Your background isn't something to shy away from, it's something to celebrate because it offers you a unique perspective on the world that only you can offer your potential employer. Your background is your greatest strength, not a weakness to overcome.
How do you turn your background into a strength? By turning it into a compelling story about you.¹ ² ³ ⁴ A story that people remember. Here's how to approach writing it:
- Mindset shift: Value your difference
- Self-Reflection: Define the elements of your story
- Craft your personal story arc to highlight challenges, learning, and growth
- Cohesion: Pulling together your personal brand
- Promotion: Reinforce your brand through your story
1. Mindset shift: Value your difference
The first thing you have to understand is that your perspective is valuable. Everything that has gone into who you are makes you different than every other person on this planet. There is infinite beauty in the diversity of each person. Start with this confidence in yourself. Your perspective is unique and that makes it special.
Any good hiring manager knows this, too. And they are trying to find you.
Imagine you're creating a team for a minute…. Do you want everyone on the team to be exactly the same? The same education. The same work experiences. The same native language. The same state or even city they grew up in? The same hobbies and interests. Wouldn't it start to get boring? If everyone on your team was exactly the same, where would the new and interesting ideas come from? Would there even be a place for differences of opinion?⁵
We need to challenge each others' ideas in order to think deeper and further hone our perspectives. Intellectual challenge is a good thing. This is something I've especially enjoyed about living in France. The cultural history of Enlightenment philosophy and the French Revolution continue to affect the culture and its effects are visible through every conversation.⁶ It's refreshingly wonderful because being questioned about what you think and believe to be true helps to clarify your ideas. And this can happen in a work culture when trust and respect are part of your team values.⁷
When I'm growing UX teams, I'm not looking for similarities, I'm looking for differences. Differences in perspectives. In educational backgrounds. In skillsets. In lived experiences. In cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In native language and country. In career goals and personal interests.
A good leader won't dictate HOW to approach a solution. They might give ideas or steer you away from learned failures, but a good leader will paint the picture of the goal, the WHAT, and let you figure out the HOW. (Check out The difference between Management and Leadership in UX for more about what a good leader looks like).
It’s our differences that make us interesting as humans. When we come together to work together on a common goal, these differences come out in exciting ways. We realize that there are other ways of reaching a goal. We learn that there are other, equally valid, ways of solving a puzzle.⁸ ⁹ Maybe we even learn a bit about our own brand of crazy.
Now, with this shift in your mindset, it's time to move on to some self-reflection.
2. Self-Reflection
As you think about your background, what are the key elements? You might start with where you were born, grew up, went to college/university, and some of the jobs you've had in the past. This is an easy starting point, because a lot of this is already on your resume. But now it's time to go deeper.
Think about what goal has propelled you through your experiences. Why did you choose to study what you got your degree in? What was your original goal? Was it a specific type of job or industry or even company? Why did you choose that? What factors in your life stand out as defining moments?
If you've ever moved across the city, state, country, or to a new country, you have a huge opportunity to share your experience and what you learned. Moving to a new place expands your view of the world around you and often forces us to confront our internal biases about people from different places.
Next, ponder the hardships and challenges you've had along the way. What was more difficult than you expected? What was easier? What has been the biggest challenge you've faced? Did you succeed? Why or why not?
Who are the people in your life that have helped you along the way? A special teacher who really inspired you or a mentor who is helped to guide you along the way. Do you have a mentor? How have they inspired you to take the path you’re on?
Is there a villain in your story? Who are they? What role do they have in propelling you towards your future? This could be a mentor who betrayed you or even a manager who used you as a scapegoat, or just a difficult co-worker (I've had all three of these!).
If you are trying to change gears to get into a new field that is different from your past, there are a lot questions to have answers to, mainly: WHY?¹⁰ ¹¹
- Why do you want to leave your former career? What did you learn from that career that can help you in this new role?
- Why do you want to get into UX? What is your educational journey and how has that led you to UX?
- How does your background specifically qualify you for this role? What are some of the special differences / unique perspectives you can bring to a new team?
If any of these prompts stand out to you, that’s great. Go with it. It means there is something interesting to tell.
3. Craft your personal story arc
Everyone loves a good story… ironically, we also happen to love the same story. It's a story that has been told thousands of times going back for centuries. What story is it, you might ask? It is Homer's Odyssey, Dante's Divine Comedy, Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Matrix, and many more.
It's called the Hero's Journey, a term coined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces where he lays out the journey thus:
"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."(Campbell 1949, p. 23)
You leave to go off on a quest, find a guide to help you, deal with hardships, learn from your setbacks, defeat the dragon, and come back to tell your story.
As you contemplate your background-your personal journey through this life-think about the parallels of your story to the Hero's Journey. You don’t have to get as detailed as the hero’s journey (it gets pretty in-depth), just use it as a source of inspiration for how you tell your story-your personal story arc.
For more on the Hero's Journey check out this article about the steps of the Hero’s Journey with examples from Star Wars and LOTR from Margaret Atwood. And, of course, you can also read the original book.
We already did the pre-work for this in step 2, above. You’ve defined the elements of your story that stand out to you: Your quest, mentors and friends, challenges and villains, and the happy ending where you return triumphant. There are distractions along the way and there are, of course, failures too. But overall, you have prevailed and come to a new understanding about the world with all that you have learned and grown along the way.
Now you can come back to tell your story. This is your gift to your potential employer: the wisdom you’ve taken from your journey along the way. Your lessons learned. Your skills in fighting dragons. Your broader perspective of the world around you.
What is the story arc that makes sense for you to tell? Use the Hero’s Journey as a template, take what you need, leave what doesn’t fit, and then tell the story of your background using the template.
Once you define the parallels of your background with the Hero’s Journey, you should easily be able to fill out this template:
- Hero: You
- Mentor/guide:
- Challenge:
- Villain:
- Failures and setbacks:
- Triumphant return:
Before we move on to the next step, I want to specifically call out two important aspects of your story: how you talk about failures and villains.
Failure
Don’t be afraid of failure. Everyone fails at one point or another.
Everyone.
We often fail many times-I’ve failed a lot! Maybe you have some big failures or maybe you have a bunch of minor errors. Maybe you even have an epic fail-epic fails are often great stories.
The fact that you failed is not the point-everyone fails and if you try to hide that fact, that's a red flag. What matters is what you learn from your failures. The way that you talk about your failures should be a story of personal introspection and growth. If you don't learn from your failures, then you probably still have some growing to do.¹²
How did you use that failure to help you grow? What are some things that you learned never to do again? How can you keep learning by tweaking your actions to make your future even more successful?
The Villain
Be careful about how you talk about your villain. You don’t want to come across as a victim, but as someone who has had to overcome a challenge. The villain in your story makes the challenge harder, but the story that you tell should be one of overcoming that adversity, not of succumbing to it.¹³
You also want to ensure that you are not telling a sad, depressing story, because no one wants to work with someone that brings them down. You may have had some really difficult times, but if you bring that negative energy to your potential employer, you won’t be getting that job. It’s important to contextualize the past as something that has caused you to be who you are now-whoever that person is.
4. Cohesion: Pulling together your personal brand
As you incorporate these elements into your story, themes will emerge. And these very personal themes are what make you you!
Everyone is different, yes, so your story will be different. And the key themes will also be very specific to you. And this is a very good thing! These themes will likely also represent your personal values.¹⁴
One personal example for me is my value of diversity.
Through my life experiences, I have come to truly value diversity in everything I do. From the people I surround myself with, to the people I hire for our company. I try to find unique backgrounds and experiences that will challenge our ideas and enrich our thinking.
I've seen again and again how important it is to interact with people from different places around the world. This is because I love to travel and experience new ideas, new cultures, and new languages.
This led me to create an international research company so I can learn about people around the globe for a living.
My value of diversity is hard to disentangle from who I am as a person and the company that I created. They are in alignment with each other. Did one cause the other? Maybe. Or maybe they came together because deep down, I wanted to create a space where I felt not only reflected, but also valued for my difference.
What matters for you is that you know who you are and then tell your story in a way that is authentically you.
5. Promotion: Reinforce your brand
Once you understand your path and have defined the key learnings and themes of your journey, all that's left is to tell your story.
You should reinforce your story with every opportunity you have: online and in person.¹⁵ Think about how you can reinforce your brand through:
- Your resume (Especially in your summary section)
- Your portfolio (online or physical)
- Your LinkedIn profile
- Your other social media profiles
- Your personal style
- The way you greet people
Each is an opportunity to tell and retell your story. Consistently telling your story reinforces what sets you apart from others. It defines how you are different, and thus, what special background and skills you have that you can add to any new employer.
My favorite question when I'm coaching someone is to ask them what their path was to get into UX.
You'd be surprised at how varied the responses are!
My own story is also unique: I came from a background in Music Composition. Sounds like a long ways off, huh? But it tells a great story.
And stories are what people remember.
And when you're going through the hiring process, you want to be remembered for that one thing that sets you apart as authentically you:
YOUR story.
References
[1] The Key to Landing Your Next Job? Storytelling. (hbr.org)
[2] How to Effectively Use Storytelling in Interviews | BB&Co (bbcostorytelling.com)
[3] Mastering storytelling for job interviews | Randstad Canada
[5] Why You Need Diversity on Your Team, and 8 Ways to Build It (entrepreneur.com)
[6] They think, therefore they are | The Economist
[7] 5 Reasons Why Trust Matters On Teams (forbes.com)
[8] Why Highly Diverse Work Teams Are Better at Untangling Complexity (upenn.edu)
[9] The Importance Of Diversity In Problem Solving | by Jilea Hemmings | Authority Magazine | Medium
[10] If you want to change careers, start by finding your ‘why’ (cnbc.com)
[11] How to Explain Your Career Transition (hbr.org)
[12] How to Answer Interview Questions About Failure (thebalancecareers.com)
[13] How to Turn Negative Job Experience Into Positive During a Job Interview (chron.com)
[14] 10 Ways to Build Your Personal Brand | On Careers | US News
Josh LaMar is the Co-Founder & CEO at Amplinate, a product strategy thought partner committed to promoting cross-cultural understanding and authentic human connection through ethical Design.
