UX Design Series: Introduction to UX Careers & Where Do I Begin on the UX Career Path?

Welcome to this crisp and clear introduction to the UX Design series. I am Karan Gupta, author of Building Your Brand Assets, and an architect turned UX/UI Designer currently living in Dublin, Ireland. 

I’m here to take you with me on this journey of getting started on a career path toward becoming a successful UX Designer in the 21st century. 

If you’re new to this field of UX, this series will be of tremendous help to you as the following chapters comprise tons of knowledge and experience, I gained by studying UX and practicing it on live projects.  

Introduction to UX Careers

In this chapter, I will introduce you to the vast field of UX, UI, Interaction, and Visual Design which shall be the mere tip of the iceberg. Then I’ll take you with me on a dive into the individual career paths that lay ahead of you once you enter the job market or even consider working as a freelancer. 

One thing you need to keep in mind though. UX is not a mainstream career choice like Law or Medicine or Engineering. It is an entire ocean of opportunities. There are no rules. No age limits. No specific work experience or degree requirements. 

You may come from a biology undergraduate background. You may be well in your 40s slogging off in a finance consulting company. All you need is Empathy for Users and a willingness to create better products for tomorrow. 

UX career options can be easily grouped into three categories: Design related careers, Research related careers, and Strategy related careers. These three make up almost all the jobs that you see out there in the professional world. 

Some organizations know well about this distinction, while some aren’t aware and tend to mix them, and there are some with overlapping job descriptions. You may not worry about the job descriptions for now, but after reading this series, you may start specializing in one of the three categories to stand out from the crowd. 

Now, knowing about all three categories does pay off in the long run but you need to understand that UX always happens in a team and each member of your team will specialize in one specific field so that he/she can contribute to the most valuable way possible. So, adopt the T-shaped model of expertise and specialize in the three categories while touching the surface of others for better understanding, consideration, and communication while working in teams.

Further, I will elaborate on the structure of your UX jobs, ways to build your own brand identity with a resume and a portfolio of works (even without live projects), and how to express yourself as an aspiring UX Designer. Sounds amazing, isn’t it? Ready to kickstart your engine and dive through the UX ocean? Next in this series: ‘Where Do I Begin on the UX Career Path?’

Where Do I Begin on the UX Career Path?

I’m sure I mentioned this before but let me do it once again so that it won’t be lost in the unreliable spasms of our short-term memory. UX is not a singular career option like that of Law or Medicine or Engineering. 

If you’ve studied Law, you get to become a lawyer. Your clients and the judges will surely not allow a lawyer who came to the court with a couple of certifications off the internet and an academic background in the field of Computer Science. 

You would never want your doctor to be a seasoned professional with an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts and a side job as a street artist. A civil engineer is trained to be working with structural aspects of architecture and construction. These and many more are single-career tracks with high levels of specialization.

UX is a multi-faceted, multi-path, and multi-dimensional career option with no conventional professional rules or regulations. UX hosts multiple careers that all have a single goal i.e., understanding the needs and experiences of users of all the existing and possible digital/non-digital products and services on this earth.

It might seem like a big hype in the present, but if we wear our common-sense hats for a moment, UX has been around since the day man invented fire and the wheel. One focused on the user's need to get warmth and protection from the harsh weather and the other on the user's need to get from one place to another within minimum time and with minimal effort. Sadly, there was no knowledge of capitalism back in the Stone Age.

In today’s digital era, think of UX as a bridge where humans meet technology. Surprisingly today, most professional ‘UXers’ are working on projects that target users and their use of digital products with screens, like desktops (not much in proportion), laptops, smartphones (maximum proportion), and the latest addition, wearable devices.

But let’s keep the technology or tool aside, and let’s get one thing straight here. Your bigger picture will be the same in every UX role. You will spend every minute of your professional life finding and implementing ways to enhance the smallest interactions we, humans, have with all the technologies surrounding us.

You will ensure that your users are able to fulfill their goals with the use of technologies. You’ll have to ensure that they do so without any frustration, difficulty, wastage of time in figuring out the controls, feeling lost, or being vulnerable to cybercrimes, and not hampering the business of the product/service.

You’ll be responsible for ensuring that your users are able to understand how a technology works, whether it meets their expectations, and most importantly, whether it makes them cheerful and delightful, or if it makes them tear off their eyelids and sew them to their forehead. No need to visualize the last statement, but you get what situation I’m talking about.

So, does UX sound fun or what? Doesn’t it feel great to begin walking on this career path? Let me bring out the daunting question that I felt when I made the transition from Architecture which took up almost 5 or so years of my undergraduate life.

Where Do I Start? How Do I Begin? I have this blank canvas in front of me, but I don’t where should I start painting my masterpiece!

 

Let’s discuss the prerequisites from the perspective of hiring professionals at product companies. Yes, you certainly need an undergraduate degree to get started here. 

Surprisingly today, we have some institutions offering user experience degrees right at the undergraduate level. This wasn’t true until about the year 2019 or so. I guess, universities have realized the importance of this field and finally decided to place it equivalent to all the major sciences, arts, finance, and other traditional disciplines which were mostly born out of the industrial revolution.

These user experience degrees are often found in the schools of design, media, technology, psychology, or computer science. My postgraduate degree is governed by the school of media, and we have professors from multiple disciplines including industrial design, marketing, computer science, game design, and graphic design. 

Some degrees have the design in their title or a more recognizable HCI or human-computer interaction or human factors title. But some can be unconventional titles like Interaction Design, User-centered Design, or like mine is totally unheard of, MSc in Creative Digital Media and UX.  

Some of you must be wondering whether a degree is worth it. Whether it is required for jobs. I was faced with the same conundrum, or you may call it the hardest decision of my life. I would say it depends on your circumstances and what you can afford. If you’re from a totally different academic background that had no links to anything related to UX, a degree won’t be the worst idea. If you can’t afford to lose any time or money on getting a degree, luckily, modern education is tremendously more accessible than ever before. 

If you can manage both your current job and a side hustle to develop your UX skills, go for it. If you want a break from your current job and wish to spend a year or two studying and practicing UX in the academic world, go for it. If you’re working in a large organization and can upskill yourself to a level where you can be promoted or transferred to a UX position, go for it! 

It all comes down to your current situation, the amount of risk you can take, your financial affordability, and your willingness to become a UXer for life.

But honestly, it’s not necessarily required for you to have a specific UX degree to enter this field. In fact, you’ll find people from the weirdest professional backgrounds like accounting and biology working at large organizations as successful UXers. 

You may decide to transition into UX while working at your current unrelated full-time job by reading books, articles on medium, blog posts, formal and informal online training courses, or even in-person mentoring and training.

You must set your own learning path based on the styles that suit you the best and should never worry about how the other person got his/her big break in UX. My good friend, Shubham, got into UX after studying Animation as his master’s in design degree from the Indian Institute of Bombay; whereas I worked for 3 years as a communication designer, and even as an architect, after which I came to Dublin to take a break from my professional burnout and get a formal education in UX.

Although I must say a couple of certifications were quite helpful to help me gain valuable insight into the nitty gritty of UX. But let me put a word of caution here. Don’t fall for the plethora of certification courses out there that promise you a job right upon completion. It’s a neat marketing trick used by ed-tech companies to lure in helpless students. 

Don’t complete certifications just for the sake of a lousy certificate at the end. What you learn in those courses matters the most. There’s no standard certification in the world of UX like that of an architect’s or doctor’s license. Again, while a formal degree would be a bonus to your UX growth, it’s not necessary if you can conjure up the perseverance and discipline to upskill yourself every day in the right direction.

I hope I was able to clear the clouds of indecision and was able to help you think more clearly about your first steps. Now let’s dive further into the three valleys of UX where all the job openings are concentrated: Design, Research, and Strategy. This will give you a broad view of all the possible jobs in UX. Next up: ‘Diving through Three Valleys of UX: Design, Research, and Strategy.’

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