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I pivoted a few years ago, main thing I’d tell myself is: portfolio, portfolio, portfolio. Haha.
Hard to tell exactly what exp you have so far so I’m assuming you’re from square one.
The concept of “make your own experience” I heard many places was/is really valuable to me.
For the sake of your own sanity while building up experience, Try to find a concept or idea related to something you’re excited about and do that. Have something that isn’t cookie cutter in your portfolio.
Everyone suggests pro-bono, work for friends too, if you can get 3-4 examples you’ll have something to talk about. 👍
IMO UX artifacts are cool and all that, learn figma or sketch, but basically your portfolio needs to illustrate the problems, how you approached solving them and what the impact was, good and bad.
Being decent at visual design will help too, take some fundamental courses if you don’t feel comfortable with that. If you’re going for straight UX or research that shouldn’t matter as much, but often companies are wanting both.
Competition is tough and there are not many truly entry roles but you can do it! Give yourself and the process time. Good luck!
It took me one year of getting contract work to finally find a contract to hire and then be hired full-time.
So contract work might help you build your portfolio too.
And I got the contract by reaching out to people on LinkedIn and asking them to review my portfolio.
Another tip, adding gifs to your portfolio website make people see interactions quickly (and look fancy 😂)
Based on my current experience, practicing any user research/ui skills daily will allow you make design/research decisions almost instantaneously.
Learn how to work with devs; this doesn’t just mean learning the languages, but knowing the right questions to ask when working together on a project - do they have any limitations? Are you both aligned on the project scope? I guess the only way you can practice this is teaming up with either full stack, frontend or backend devs on “passion projects” (they’re also great portfolio fillers and demonstrate your journey and decisions well).
I took a course on UX Sketching and it changed my life. Not only can I communicate my thoughts to the team, but involving them in this process by allowing them to sketch sets the tone for endless creativity from everyone - it’s a skill any future company will value from you.
My company values using scrum practices and I was surprised at how much they align with what I know as a UXer. Scrum techniques help me make informed research decisions a hell of a lot quicker and sort of force the whole team to get involved in the research side of things through “Sprints”.
Those are just some thoughts, but there are endless possibilities. The best thing about pivoting into UX and working on case studies for your new portfolio is that you won’t have any time constraints, so take your time and document everything!
Thank you so much!! I’m so grateful for all this thorough advice. I actually have a really good friend who is a front end developer, so I’ll definitely pick his brain and see if I can collaborate with him on a project!
I’ll 100% check out a UX Sketching course as well, that sounds super interesting. I’ll definitely start to add to my portfolio with all the input I’ve gotten. I really appreciate you taking the time to reply to my post!