Life after Bootcamp: the UX job hunt

Setting your UX Identity (Part 1)

Photo by Magnet.me on Unsplash

It has been almost two years since I attended the C2C (Code 2 Change) mentorship meet-up. As 2020 is concluding, the Q word enters the mind — as in, quit. Everyone tells you to keep it up, but no one tells you how to know or when to quit.

I recently was fortunate to catch up again with my former Bootcamp facilitator, Axelav, and she rightfully thought that it was time to assess how far I’ve gone and the lessons that I have learned to reach a decision. Two years is quite a long time in the busyness of the grind with few moments and space to be creative. It’s time to pay attention again.

In this essay, I zero in on how I learned to formulate my UX identity by combining my analysis of my job applications from 2018, 2019, and 2020 as well as the framework prompts of the LinkedIn platform.

The platform of LinkedIn is an essential recruitment tool in the Northern/Western Europe job market. Two of its important features are those found underneath your photo — the identity job labels and the elevator pitch about yourself found underneath your name. These two components are the hardest and trickiest things to learn and it took me months to at least a year to have one “final” and satisfactory version after several iterations.

Let’s start with the job label identity tags. I have cycled with job tags: UX Researcher, User Experience Researcher, Social Scientist, UX/UI, and various combinations from one applications to another, depending on their job title. Rather than what I want to do and who I am/growing to become. This problem has haunted me even prior to deciding on going to the field of UX and this reflects the level of difficulty in any job application or career pathway.

I looked at my 2018 early career identity statement designed for the academic field. The academic job description requires that you state your Ph.D. expertise and current interests.

PhD Expertise: A China specialist with a focus on student and labour mobility; organizations and workplace culture and change; corporate anthropology; and urban social moralities.

Current Interests: Philippines-Southeast Asia (SEA) vis à vis China; urban moralities and infrastructure citizenship; sustainable public/private spaces in cities; design anthropology with specific focus on rapid methodologies, product design, and process integrity.

I had too many competing interests without a clear focus or direction. Compare this with Anna Weichselbraun a person who now works at University of Vienna. I first encountered her identity statement via her website CV/portfolio while she was looking for a tenure track position. She had a two paragraph brief description of herself that impressed me. I can no longer find the short form from her pre-employment period but here’s an example of her statement on her current website that is not very different from her prose during her application period:

Identity Label: anthropologist of nuclear power, expertise, and bureaucracy

Brief Description: Hello, my name is Anna Weichselbraun (‘vaɪ̯ç.səl.bʁaʊ̯n) and I’m an anthropologist of knowledge, technology, and organizations.

My work draws on semiotic analysis to examine how technology, knowledge, and political values combine to form the “common sense” of global technological governance in the Anthropocene.

Compare mine with this highly focused 2-sentences about who she is. Anna’s statement states clearly her direction and focus rather than my generic keyword citations. I’m a big fan of her thinking and clarity. (I would direct you to The Professor is In for top of the line academic advice on crafting your identity and job application package and career direction, even before you graduate! Highly recommended for academics.)

What is unassailable is that — whether it is for academia or industry— clarity in your own identity translates to distinct value and self-confidence in the job market.

This same problem haunted me when I shifted from academia to UX. I eventually landed on my current title by listening to my gut, doing 19 applications in 2019, 24 applications in 2020 (and counting), and reading through three times that number of UX job descriptions (more on those in a separate post) to understand the UX job landscape. (This doesn’t include Easy Apply ones).

Based on my job applications and interviews, I learned that there were roughly four types of UX expectations in the job and the job market.

1. Research Technician type — a job description that sees and intimidates you by requiring a multitude of tools (Adobe CC, InVision, etc.) you need to have and skills (lab testing, A/B testing, card sorting, etc.) or even coding (HTML, CSS, etc.) on the get-go before the HR even considers you

• These are usually from larger companies that have established UX teams in which they require a specific skill set to fit into their workflow. On the other side of the coin, these are also companies without one dedicated UX team, but also perhaps have smaller budgets and therefore, require the researcher to be designers/front-end coders — a UX designer with strong researcher skills or vice versa.

This example is for a Junior Service Design position that requires extensive tool proficiency and unsurprisingly, expectations for a much more experienced client-facing individual. Shocking, but this is the norm in junior positions in job ads.

2. Research + Business or Strategy type — a job description that emphasizes a more business application of research as your added value. This requires experience, a more advanced profile, and high client interaction experience.

• These are jobs in consultancy positions or in agencies that require a specific skill set to quickly deliver UX services into their client teams and who are business case advocates. The position is less about research (this is already a given) and more how to educate the client in the research process and how to use insights to help solve their business problems.

The job description here sounds like a true blue researcher but actually emphasizes process and techniques to quickly guide client teams into the business application of research. This position requires strong evangelization skills to advocate to other members within (ideation and workshops) and outside of the firm (white space opportunities).

3. Research + Product Development type — a job description that emphasizes the relationship between research translation, product manager/owner relationship, and insight evangelization with the team

• These are jobs from single product or platforms that require a knowledge of agile/scrum framework which may or may not be indicated. The position prioritizes a version of Lean UX research to fit into their current framework. Depending on the team, research may heavily lean towards validation (you will read a lot of usability test skills requirement and optimization requirements from research) or ideation (discovery and in-depth research requirement) and in various combinations of those.

The position here requires both ideation and validation work. The position is directly embedded with front-end teams and calls for optimization experiments such as running usability testing protocols guerrilla style and in a usability lab environment.

4. Personality type + Research — companies choose a certain personality as primary feature prior to you getting in the door (sensible) these companies value their corporate culture and want a candidate that fits (assuming you have already passed the initial skills screening call or review)

• These are jobs from predominantly Dutch firms that may require you to take a psychology test as part of their application process or an HR person directed to identify a specific type of individual to match their teams and corporate culture. Most indicate this in their job ads (more generically as fun, adventurous, etc.) but for those who don’t, you will learn this during the interview (partly too late) or you would have uncovered this when you do the company research as you write the cover letter (advisable).

This is an example where a company, like TopDesk CEO Wolter Smit explains why they deliberately choose “Y type” hires (self-motivated) to build their innovative workplace.

These four types are of course not exhaustive or definitive but these gave me a sense of the UX Research work done in industry. Once I knew the UX landscape, these types helped me narrow my UX identity statements, select jobs that I wanted, and identified my strengths.

I know you have heard the generic advice know yourself. I am going to tell you, know what kind of UX practitioner you want to be. First off, listen to your gut. I always felt a cringe in my stomach and felt like vomiting when I was (inadvertently) applying to research technician positions (1). I hated the job. Did I hate UX? Yes. No. I thought I did until I realized I hated the identity I was crafting for myself. Research technician positions bore me. Sure, I would love to learn other techniques and it is easy to scale up but it was not me.

I discovered “service design” as the career I really wanted to pursue with “user research” as basis. Quickly, the difference between the two is that the former looks at the macro perspective of the business / organization / client ecosystems while the latter deep dives into the customer or user. I wanted one that would allow me to switch between the two. Essentially, I was looking for opportunities in sharpening my research application skills towards business and strategic applications and working with software dev teams (numbers 2, 3). Once I settled on to my UX self-identity, I found job applications easier to discern and it eliminated my negative gut reaction. It was a personal milestone. I now had a clear pathway to write a narrow identity statement and select appropriate jobs.

My LinkedIn job label now reads as “Enterprise Service Designer, User Experience Researcher, and Anthropologist.”

I chose the service designer tag to indicate what I want to do more of and move into. My training, of course, leans heavily on the user/consumer research and I still rely on that for job applications. I used to play around with “UX Researcher and User Experience Researcher,” but UX Researcher is conflated with type 1 jobs and positions which are actually UX Designers who do research as well. The algorithm confuses the two and spews out designer positions. I have since dropped “UX Researcher” and use the more specific “User Experience Researcher” for clarity while maintaining industry standard job titles for algorithm purposes. I have also embraced my training and identity as anthropologist for distinction and attention.

My advice for your first job identity paragraph, steal the great ones and repurpose it. I can no longer show you my first versions because none of it was saved and people change their statements all the time once they are hired! So you’ve got to be quick. I benefitted by browsing profiles from other fields on LinkedIn.

You’ve seen my 2018 academic compass statement. Here’s a revised version of it and I quite liked the result because I have identified what I liked in a future academic position:

Anthropologist with a combined ten-year experience in user experience principles, empathy, and organizational change seeking to mentor young minds, collaborate with UI and design experts to create transformative learning modules for students, and establish sustained academic-industry partnerships towards ethical design-thinking.

The formula in the sentence can be disaggregated like this:

1. state the occupational identity you are going for: e.g. social scientist, data scientist, UX researcher, UX designer, etc.
2. years of job experience and expertise; I’ve personally wavered from 10 years (or the extent of my working life combining academic research with other industry research) to just exclusively 5 years in the industry (yes, I counted the number of months!); more recently, I’ve decided on sticking 5 years to make my industry work experience clear and separate and justify junior position applications
3. what you want out of the job and why you are applying in that field

4. what you can offer or your added value to the company or team (why they want to hire you)

With the sentence formula, my UX type 3 job applications identity statement now read like this:

Anthropologist, with a combined ten-year experience in network thinking, user research principles, and service and experience mapping, seeking to collaborate with an R&D team of visionary design thinkers to craft strategic designs that maximize user delight, build adaptive ecosystems, and nurture meaningful business relationships.

I can now customize it easily in different versions in my resume, CV, and portfolio to keep the sentences and phrases I like but could not use in the LinkedIn pages. For instance, I have modified the statement for behaviour specialist job applications (quality control types) to read like this:

Anthropologist with a combined ten-year experience in human behaviour and organizational change seeking to collaborate with a variety of stakeholders to maximize work performance, create value from safe workplaces, and influence effective business relationships.

I have since reformulated the statement and be more specific about my work experience and interest:

1. Your identity label
2. Years of experience + type of industry
3. Expertise
4. What you want out of the job
5. What you can deliver for them

I’m an anthropologist with five years of experience in the fintech, healthcare, and retail consumer markets. I am adept in cultural observation, designing emphatic user research, and applying network thinking to research design. I am seeking to collaborate with an R&D team of visionary design thinkers to craft strategic designs that maximize user delight, build adaptive ecosystems, and nurture meaningful business relationships.

I have longer statements and variations which I have sprinkled in the portfolio and other places. In the two years since I started doing this, I have become much clearer about what a UX job entails, what I want, and how I need to communicate my value.

So far, the algorithm agrees. This is the first hurdle. The rest is still up to me.

In the next post, I will discuss the merits of a coach, mentor, and a structured online guidance program. Is it worth it?