Mistake-Proof Framework for Career Change
The story of the first geologist to become a UX designer
If you, like me, discovered your passion for UX design after studying something else and working somewhere else, you probably already did some googling and figured what it takes to transition:
Choose inspiring books and blogs. Choose projects for your portfolio. Choose freelance. Volunteer. Find a mentor. Choose Behance or Dribbble or both. Choose courses. Choose a bootcamp. Choose networking over sitting at home. Choose learning HTML and CSS. Build your own website. Make it personal. Make it professional. Make it responsive, accessible and aesthetically pleasing.
Don’t get me wrong, this is great advice, but browsing through it all may feel overwhelming. When I decided to transition, I worked as a full-time geologist and product support guru at a geoscientific software company. My job was neither close to design, nor provided much room for side UX projects. “How am I going to do it?” — I kept asking myself. Do I read the “Design of Everyday Things” on Wednesday after work, cancel my gym on Thursday to take an introductory course, study user research fundamentals on Friday evening, and spend the weekend redesigning the Instagram Stories feature?
Career Transition Done Wrong
Naturally I started with an online introductory course. It felt nice, easy and very inspiring. A woman from Coursera said that UX is everywhere around us, so I picked the first thing that I thought needed immediate attention from an emerging UX designer, i.e. a website at a company where I worked back then, and started improving it for good. I worked hard to make it perfect, and dreamed of how I would surprise my managers with the new design, they would be astonished by my newly-learned UX skills and implement the changes right away.
None of this happened. But there was no time to get upset — I discovered that my close friends needed UX help. Their e-commerce eco-store wasn’t getting enough attention and too many customers dropped at the check-out. This seemed like a perfect challenge, and I dived right into the best practices for similar websites, sketched different versions of landing and check-out pages and tried to bring them to life in WordPress. Even though my new designs were never destined to see the light, I believed my career changing journey was on the right track, and having two projects in my portfolio I submitted a few job applications.
Needless to say I didn’t hear back. One year passed since I decided to transition, and even though all these affairs kept me very busy in the after-work hours, none got me any close to my final goal. Worse, though hard to admit, being cooked in my own juice for such a long time made me very protective of my work and I couldn’t see that I had to make a pivot as soon as possible.
Finally I decided to do what I should have done a long time ago and reached out to a UX design community for feedback. Finding a perfect opportunity didn’t take long and I joined a mentorship program run by Ladies That UX, Amsterdam’s chapter. I shared my portfolio with a mentor I was matched with, expecting to hear what I can improve on to land a job. What I actually heard was different — I learnt that my portfolio was very far from UX design. It did have some traces of web design and information architecture at most, but neither demonstrated UX skills nor showed any thinking process. There was nothing to improve on and, as if I built a house without a foundation, I had to start from scratch.
Career Transition Done Right
I kicked off with a personal UX project and tracked my progress on a Kanban board focusing of three main pillars: Learning, Hands-on and Feedback. None of the items is considered finished until it gets through the Feedback stage. I would read books, articles and blogs about the next UX step on my board (e.g. Online Survey, Research Synthesis or User Journey), apply that knowledge immediately on my project, show it to my mentor to get feedback, address it and move on to the next step. Walls at home were covered with sticky white boards and post-its, users were interviewed, wireframes were sketched, and I was given feedback every two weeks.
I must say that it felt intense: having already spent an entire year finishing something to only realise it wasn’t up to par, I developed a huge fear “What if they told me I was no good?”. To my surprise, it wasn’t happening. I was getting feedback regularly and in small chunks, so that I could easily manage and address it. By the time the mentorship program came to an end, not only I knew what I needed to finalize for my portfolio, but also had a handful of good connections in the design circles.
A few months later, when my portfolio was ready, still coping with my fears, I reached out to several other UX/UI designers in my network for flash mentoring. And guess what? It wasn’t scary, on the contrary, we had very fruitful discussions. Depending on the experience each person had, they pointed out what could be improved in my portfolio and shared their opinion on how I could move forward. It was also very useful to see how they reacted to my professional story, which parts they found interesting and which I had to make more appealing.
Framework For Career Change
Reflecting back on my journey, I discovered that I was progressing the most if I sticked to the continuous loop of Learning — Hands On Experience — Feedback and made it an iterative process. When the loop was reasonably short, my portfolio was growing at a faster pace and it was much easier to battle the inevitable uncertainty of the career change. After each iteration I would add an already validated piece to my UX designer’s profile (e.g. a user journey map to a portfolio project, an improved CV, a refined personal story, etc) and get a little closer to my goal.
Developing a Taste For It
With my portfolio 100% ready and myself well-prepared to talking to others about my work, I wanted to see what the response from hiring people would be this time and applied for several jobs. Even though the potential employers liked my portfolio and motivation, they were hesitant to deal with me as I had no real work experience apart from the personal projects.
This was clear feedback, so I started exploring my options for getting experience. Soon, another perfect opportunity entered the stage: I applied and got selected for a 5-month traineeship program at the Digital Society School in Amsterdam. So, I quit my job and made my UX designer title official.
This time I wanted to get response from the hiring market as soon as possible. So, one month after starting the traineeship, I updated my CV, added freshly gained skills to my portfolio and started applying for jobs again. And bingo! Two and a half months into the program I got my first real job offer as a UX designer at an EdTech startup that focuses on reskilling and upskilling people for the jobs of the future. We had such a blast talking about their product and how it matches with my self-directed learning framework. I was super happy that not only my career changing strategy worked, but it also turned out to be a valuable asset in itself.
Lessons Learned
Learn something, then do something, then ask for feedback is a logical sequence of steps for a new beginning. Yet, looking at people trying to start a new career, myself included, I see that the feedback component often goes missing. We either substitute it with similar, less effective actions, like posting our work on Behance and passively waiting for likes and appreciation, or worse, keep postponing it until we’re ready (which is always a little bit later).
It took me three years to land a job in UX design since I first got interested in it. Could have I done it faster? Hell yes, had I only asked for feedback from the very start.
Portfolio links
- Contact me if you’d like to see the portfolio from the “Career Transition Done Wrong” story.
- Here’s the link to my “Career Transition Done Right” portfolio on Behance.
Thank you for reading!
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