Skill Gaps Early-Career UX Designers Need to Overcome to Get Hired or Promoted
Today’s job market is more competitive than ever. With a surge in UX bootcamp graduates, remote work opportunities, and tech layoffs, more professionals are searching for fewer roles. Landing a job or promotion requires more than design skills and a solid portfolio.
As someone who has personally reviewed hundreds of designers’ resumes & portfolios, taught & mentored junior design talent, and built design organizations, I’m always on the lookout for three key skills that distinguish top talent from the rest. Mastery of design software and understanding the design process is table stakes. To truly stand out from the competition, early-career designers need to bridge these three skill gaps that are generally not taught in schools and bootcamps.
1. Proven Ability to Collaborate With Cross-Functional Peers
Face it, a lot of designers are introverts. Many enter the field with a romanticized vision of being able to sit alone with their laptop and a cup of coffee, creating their brilliant designs in peace. Unless you are the ultra-rare person who can—in addition to creating great designs—write and debug all of the code, gather insightful user feedback, and also have the acumen to run and market a business, you’re going to need to work well with other people.
Like it or not, designing great products is a team sport. To be successful designers must work well with their peers in product, engineering, marketing, and research. Most training programs have designers work on portfolio projects with other designers which isn’t representative of the day-to-day experience at most companies. During the interview process you need to be able to demonstrate your ability to work with challenging development and/or product partners. Designers without practical experience working on a cross-functional team are more likely to be passed over in favor of candidates with a track record of working well with others.
How to acquire this skill: Seek out collaborative projects, either in internships, freelance roles, or open-source initiatives. Ask to sit in on cross-functional meetings, or shadow product, marketing, and engineering colleagues to understand how different teams work together. Document your collaboration with cross functional teammates in your case studies. The more exposure you get to team priorities and dynamics, the better.
2. Communication and Presentation Skills
The best designers are influential communicators. In the real world, designers need to effectively explain and defend their design decisions and clearly describe high level design visions and specific user interactions—verbally and in writing. It’s not enough to simply produce and hand off what you believe to be good work. Your teammates need to understand and buy in to your vision in order to deliver it. As a designer, you need to be able to convincingly sell your ideas because everyone that you work with will have opinions about your designs. Navigating all of these (sometime conflicting) opinions can be the most frustrating part of being a designer; without strong communication & presentation skills, you will be at a disadvantage.
Part of being a strong communicator is being a great listener. Good designers develop their listening skills to be open to and understand how to interpret feedback they receive from stakeholders and users. The ability to actively listen can help deepen user empathy which can lead teams to create more innovative solutions that address unmet customer needs.
How to acquire this skill: Take every opportunity to practice presenting your work during design reviews and critique sessions. Ask questions and provide written and verbal feedback to your peers as well. Record yourself giving mock presentations and seek candid feedback from people you trust. You can also take public speaking or storytelling courses to hone these skills. Remember that listening is just as critical — develop active listening habits by engaging with user research and stakeholder discussions.
3. Business Acumen
In all likelihood, you will be trading your design skills for a salary to help an organization earn money. In addition to understanding user needs, it’s crucial to be aware of how that organization makes money, measures success, and how your skills as a designer can support those efforts.
Developing business acumen can improve designers’ ability to communicate design decisions and the broader value of design and research with product management and business leaders. For example, eliminating form fields during registration may lead to achieving the business goal of increasing registered users. Lacking business knowledge, you are just the person who creates the wireframes or makes the UI look good—there to execute product management’s vision. Designers without business acumen are easily replaced.
As you learn more about business and user needs, you’ll be poised to create an experience vision and strategy. The ability to develop & communicate strategies that differentiate a business from its competitors can make you an indispensable partner.
How to acquire this skill: Practice your active listening skills during meetings and conversations related to organizational strategy, planning, and analysis. Find opportunities to ask questions like, “how are we measuring that?” or “what are our competitors doing to solve this problem?” Here are some additional resources to get you started:
- The first section of The Designer’s Guide to Product Vision (shameless plug: I am the co-author of this book) is about how designers can transition from tactical to strategic partners by learning to speak the language of business.
- Learn more about the Business Model Canvas and its relationship to human centered design.
- This is a great video about the difference between planning & strategy.
- Outcomes Over Outputs is a useful (and VERY short) book that can help you frame conversations about how product success is measured.
Conclusion
Closing the skill gaps in collaboration, communication, and business acumen are the keys to standing out from your competition as an early-career UX designer. Actively seeking opportunities to practice these skills and incorporating them into your portfolio case studies will work wonders to help you on your way to securing a role and position you for a robust career.
