Breaking into the job market. The story of my first UX job

One of the top concerns I hear from you on Instagram is that you don’t have any work experience.. and you’re trying to get a job but every company wants someone with work experience. However you need to get that first job in order to get the work experience 😩😵‍💫

I get it, it’s so frustrating! But I want to begin by reminding you, you just need that one hiring manager to give you a chance. Just one.

And yes you will be getting rejection after rejection. This unfortunately is part of the game. You need to see this process as a numbers game to begin with. The more jobs you apply for, the higher the changes of getting a job.

I’ll give a bit of background about my experience getting my first real UX job

It was exhausting! And it wasn’t an enjoyable experience.

I was looking through my emails when I was writing this blog to remind myself of my journey (I have no idea why I still have emails organised in folders since 2016..🫣 I’m a digital hoarder 😂)

But it took me over a year to get my first real UX job. See images below.

Here’s 1/20 of the emails I got. I started at the end of 2014 and got serious in 2015 and starting putting more effort in.

And at the start of 2016 you can see from this image that I got my offer letter for a Junior UX Designer job 🎉

One of the reasons for this was because it took me a very long time to figure out what role I wanted, I had no idea UX was even a thing! So you can see from the images that I was applying for everything I could find from art-worker to conceptual creative designer. I still have no idea what a conceptual creative designer is.. even though I went to that interview! And I don’t think the art-worker job suited my interests but it was paying great so I went for it 😂

I got rejected from all of these jobs.

I spent a lot of time crafting my Resumes and I was very good at describing what skills I had so I would often get invited to an interview. However they quickly realised I had no idea how to do that specific job and I wouldn’t get the role 😂

I will go on a tangent here to say this is one of the thing that frustrates me about a lot when it comes to entry level and junior role interviews. Some companies expect you to be able to move mountains, even though you’re applying for an entry level job! If a company does expect this. I see it as a red flag, and if you want my advice, I would stay away from working for them. This expectation speaks volumes about the companies culture and their unrealistic expectations.

But this isn’t true for all companies. There are still many companies who are happy to take designers with little or no experience.

I got so many rejections. However I whole heartedly know it’s just a part of the process when breaking into a competitive market. And if you keep trying, and updating your resume and portfolio you will definitely find a company which is a great match for you.

If anything, it is a lot easier now because when I was looking for UX jobs, there was such little free education and content to guide me on how to present myself and what skills I needed to develop which made it a lot more difficult. Whereas now, I give away all the information you need to help get that first job for free on my Instagram. There are also many other great designers on Instagram who also provide a lot of free information.

So going back to my journey. I got offered a real UX job in 2016. I say ‘real’ because I hadn’t done UX in an agile company for a single digital product until this. I was working as more of a digital designer.

Which is another point I want to mention. I was working as a digital designer whilst I was looking for this job. I first did an internship for this small (5 person company at the time) agency during University. And I worked so hard during this internship that they offered me a job as a digital designer for when I finished University. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do moving forward, but it was a creative job and I was getting paid for it so I took it. Also they gave me a free brand new MacBook Pro to use when I joined so how could I say no? 😂

It was perfect for me at the time. It was low pressure, I had a space to get comfortable using design tools and developing my softer skills and I got to work on projects where I was having a direct impact on the agencies revenue.

Because I was working as a digital designer, the pressure to get that job was obviously a lot less so taking over a year to get that first job wasn’t as stressful as it would have been if I didn’t have a job. So I had some room to be a tiny bit fussy with what role I was going to take (it sounds like I was getting offers left, right, and centre. I was not haha. What I mean is I could be a bit more picky with what roles and salaries I was applying for).

I remember going in for the interview for the job I did finally end up getting. I remember it so vividly, probably because I was so incredibly nervous.

During the interview I was sitting in a beautiful board room with a glass wall, looking out to a sea of iMacs and designers working. There was a huge monitor with the number 987,012 on the screen. The company were waiting to hit their first million users. (They are now almost a unicorn company - A unicorn company is a company with a valuation of over $1 billion) Admittedly this meant nothing to me, I barely knew what a start up was then!

The interview was 3 rounds.. All in 1 day. So the entire process took around 4 hours.. Which sounds insane thinking back to it now. But I guess I could get it over and done with in 1 day. The first interview was with the Head of Design who would be my manager. The second was with a Lead Designer and a Product Manager and the final interview was with the CEO.

It’s so interesting to think back to it now and how nervous I was and how a few months later, all the people who interviewed me became some of my closest friends at the time! It was a good lesson for me to see the people who are interviewing me as people just like myself who I could potentially become great friends with. This reframe helped me feel less nervous with interviews since as I wasn’t seeing the interviewers as these insane talented alien like people who are emotionless 😬

I finished the 3 rounds of interviews and said bye to everyone and left the office having absolutely no idea if it went really well or absolutely awful. I got on the tube and once I arrived at the train station I received a phone call from the recruiter..

I think I actually jumped up because I was so happy (and shocked) when he told me they offered me the job. I was so surprised as I had no UX design experience and this was an amazing role, at an amazing company, with an amazing salary! And another free MacBook Pro! 😂

Yes I had experience in a creative role previously, but believe me, the work I was doing had no relevance to the work I would be doing at this company. The CEO and Head of Design later also told me they weren’t interested in what I did at that company anyway.

I asked the recruiter what feedback the company had given and why they selected me as I had no real UX experience. He said to me the CEO said “you’re one of the first junior designers who we’ve spoken to about their project and they actually spoke about their users as real people, and not props in a design project”.

This shows the absolute importance of really caring about your users and thinking about them throughout your project. Don’t just do design activities and tasks because you think that’s the ‘right thing’ to do or because your manager or someone on Instagram has told you you should do it. Ultimately you’re creating something which will be used by people, so take the time to understand them and develop empathy for them in order to craft the best experiences and solve problems they actually face in their lives.

This is a huge learning I want you to take away. As over 90% of the portfolio reviews I do with designers, the designers talk me through their portfolio and they just talk about the process, tools, frameworks and methodologies they used. Don’t get me wrong, I love process, I’m literally known for being the designer who loves process at work but your process should be secondary. It shouldn’t have the lime light. Your user should have the lime light.

Let me give you an example. If you’re talking through your portfolio during an interview. Instead of saying:

“I did some interviews and I got these insights. Here are my post it notes showing the insights, and then I did some competitor research and here’s the screenshots of the competitors screen designs and post it notes to show what worked well and didn’t work well:

Try this instead:

“After conducting 7 one to one interviews with users (you can see some of the analysis here). I found out something that really surprised me as it challenged my initial assumption about struggles users had. We thought users would love being able to speak to us directly on the phone, so we made this option available. However users told us that they were actually quite nervous about speaking to us on the phone and wanted to go through a text chat service first to build up their confidence. It’s also interesting as when doing our competitor analysis, they all offer this phone service so maybe the chat service is something that could differentiate us. Or we might find that the competitors have it right and the phone is the way to go”

Can you see the difference. The first one almost shows you have no users. There is no human element to it at all. Whereas the second example is all about the person. Another way to help you do this might be to not use the word ‘user’. Start using ‘person’ or a name or anything to help make them feel more human. As the users can feel very detached from a design project when we’re working on it.

I hope this was useful. And I hope seeing your projects in this way helps you with your portfolio and interviews but most importantly with your design work!