Hired in 3 months with no experience?

Hi, I’m Maureen and I work as a product designer and design content creator. The Cursor Magazine is my online publication on design, workshop facilitation and career.

If you work as a designer in the UX field or you’re exploring a career in UX, you might have come across the many many articles and videos of designers who landed in a job in UX in mere months and with no previous experience.

A Google search on “UX job in 3 months no experience” has 37 million hits. Indeed, the idea that everyone can become a UX designer in just a few months has been around for a while and has been pretty persistent.

This newsletter is a deep dive into this topic. Where does this narrative come from and does it benefit us designers or is it hurting our industry?

Everyone can become a rich designer (?)

Are there other careers that are so heavily advertised as easy to get into and easy to get “rich” with other than UX design?* Perhaps developer roles, but the narrative of “everyone can become a UX designer and earn good money” has been very persistent.

It is a narrative that sells well and it’s not completely untrue either. Unlike many other professions, there is no official certification for UX design. Everyone can call themselves a UX designer. You don’t even need expensive degrees or years of studies because bootcamps and online courses offer relatively inexpensive curricula (compared to the costs of an average degree in the US) that span just a few weeks or months.

There are also many designers who are completely self-taught and never had any official design education. On top of that, the tech industry has been booming the past years and with that came opportunities for designers to land good paying jobs. No wonder that the combination of this low barrier to entry and the prospect of having a comfy job attracted many aspiring designers in the past years.

However, there are increasingly more voices questioning if all of this hype is actually serving aspiring designers and the design industry. For many years now, designers have been arguing why they should ‘get a seat at the table’ and be taken seriously within their organisation. (sources: 1 ,2 ,3 ) There are plenty of articles on how you can grow the UX maturity within your company, which oftentimes is still fairly low. (examples: 1 ,2 ,3 )

In other words, we have a long way to go before design is consistently seen as a worthy partner in organisations. Does the narrative of “everyone can become a designer in just a few months” help our case here?

I think the answer to that question is clear.

Not only the voices of critics within the industry are getting louder. As the jobmarket changed, many designers were laid off and more and more people struggle to land a job, aspiring designers start to wonder: “Is it too late to become a UX designer?”

The jobmarket changed

When I starting my UX journey in 2017, I had a hard time finding reliable resources on UX design. There weren’t many bootcamps or courses available. There were even fewer UX designers sharing their experiences online. Yet, it was easier for me to get my career started at that time than it is for juniors today.

Less supply of designers meant higher demand. After almost a year of studying UX online I landed my first job after applying to just one position. The ‘interview process’ took 1 hour. The offer was in my mailbox the morning after.

Compare that with today, where the average interview process takes months. My last interview process with Miro consisted of 7 rounds and took 3 months from start to finish. Many designers don’t even get to the interview stage, regardless of their ongoing efforts.

How could an industry and the career opportunities change so drastically in just a few years?

From 2017 to 2021 I noticed a change in the jobmarket and UX industry. Forbes already spoke about a “UX Goldrush” in 2017, calling UX Design one of the most in demand disciplines. (source )

In the years before the pandemic more and more people become interested in a UX career. Bootcamps and courses popped up everywhere. It was the time where I decided to start sharing my experience changing careers online, since I had so many people around me asking about it.

The pandemic did not seem to stop the growth of UX jobs, but rather accelerate it. The growth of e-commerce businesses and tech business in combination with the new working from home policy meant that more designers were needed and more people suddenly had the time to look into a career switch. Fed up with toxic corporate work culture, inflexible working from home policies and meagre work benefits and feeling hopeful about a new career in booming tech, many people quit their job. The Great Resignation had started.**

Fast forward to 2024. The jobmarket has changed a lot in the past two years.

The inspiring tech employees that used to vlog their ‘Day in the life of a product designer in SF’ now shared recordings of their layoffs. The DMs I received of people securing their first job and sharing their joys with me were replaced with DMs of people desperate and disillusioned after applying to dozens, hundreds of jobs. The job postings for entry level designers became less and less.

Yet the narrative that UX Design was one of those ‘get rich quick’ careers persists.

We can guess why this is…

…perhaps the wealth of free content and UX Influencers gave off the idea that a cushy UX job is in reach to everyone.

…perhaps the bootcamps had such a lucrative business model in their hands selling pre-recorded courses that they didn’t bother introducing admission protocols and controlling the number of entry level designers entering the job market, ultimately overwhelming the market.

…perhaps aspiring designers were blinded by the thought of making big bucks and didn’t do the proper research and planning that is required for a careerchange.

Can you actually get hired in 3 months with 0 experience?

How much of the “hired in 3 months with no work experience” is true?

I asked around on LinkedIn and Instagram and these were the results among over 450 replies. The outcome positively surprised me at first. The majority of the replies said they found their first job within 3 months. When I dug deeper and asked those who replied how they managed this, I noticed the outcome needed some readjustment.

It turns out that many of those who did get hired within three months with no work experience…

• Found their first UX job pre-pandemic
• Had relevant work experience from adjacent roles (graphic design for example)

But also…

• Focused strongly on (in-person) networking
• Took on personal projects and side projects, charity and internships outside of the curriculum offered by their bootcamp

Getting hired in a short time period with no UX experience (0-3 months) is possible, but it is also very unlikely in the current jobmarket. Those who do succeed oftentimes already have a way in through their network or skillset. Breaking into UX from a completely different is considerably harder when you don’t have transferrable skills or design affinity.

So…where do we go from here?

Overall, I wonder why there is such a strong focus on breaking into the field as soon as possible. There’s plenty of discourse in our industry on how we need to evangelise UX, on how design is not valued within companies the way it should be.

Why would others take our jobs seriously, when there’s such a strong sentiment that everyone can become a designer in just a few weeks with zero experience?

A career change takes time and that’s okay. A career change takes a lot of determination and that is something you should plan for. You will reach a point where you don’t have motivation anymore.

Here are some suggestions to all parties involved.

Bootcamps: limit your admissions and go back to your roots.

The initial strength of bootcamps was to react quickly to market needs. They offered curricula that made use to the newest tools and technologies. Their fast tracks enabled people to enter the market quickly with relevant skills.

Over time, these bootcamps have become the establishment that they were challenging. In some cases, the methods and tools that are taught are no longer relevant (why on earth are people still told to build portfolios on Behance?)

The gap between what bootcamps teach and what junior designers need to perform in the real world is becoming bigger and bigger. It’s time for bootcamps to return to what set them apart from universities in the first place: keep their curricula up-to-date and their ties to the industry close.

Another strength of the bootcamp was connecting students with mentors and tutors working in the field and offering a high-quality curation of information.

How can you scale a bootcamp model like that? Here are some things I’ve seen…

• Pre-recorded videos
• Peer-reviewed assignments
• Less face-to-face time with mentors and tutors
• Admission for everyone with enough money and time, no questions asked.

The result? In the worst case people find out months and many dollars spent later that this is not the career for them.

Those who do finish the bootcamp and found their new passion enter an overheated jobmarket where dozens of their peers apply for the same jobs, with the same portfolios from the same bootcamps. There’s been too much focus on quantity over quality and one way to change is to start introducing applications and make a more careful selection of students.

However, it’s easy (and frankly, a bit lazy) to put all the blame on bootcamps and dismiss them as selling false hope.

There still is a very important need that bootcamps solve and that is saving time through information curation. Enrolling in a bootcamp means you pay for convenience and peace of mind instead of spending time building your own curriculum, do quality control on the content you consume, build your own network and find your own mentors.

Convenience instead of quality should be the main reason to invest in a bootcamp.

Aspiring designers: don’t be naive.

Aspiring designers can not afford to be naive anymore.

We should be aware that bootcamps and online courses have their own agenda (for example increase student enrolments and drive profit) and this agenda may not match the goals of aspiring designers (become equipped with relevant skills and experience to start a career in UX ).

It’s on aspiring designers to do their homework and get clarity on what their motivation is, what they pay for and what they can realistically expect from that.

The adagium ‘if it sounds too good to be true - it probably it’ definitely applies here. Expecting to succeed at career change within mere months and no prior experience a is a very naive expectation in today’s market.

Content creators: use your platform to share realistic experiences and hands-on advice.

Lastly a suggestion for my fellow design educators and content creators. We also should have a critical look at what message we put out. Content with headlines like “Landed a UX job with NO experience” have great viral potential, but do they offer a motivational outlook or do they feed into unrealistic expectations?

Personally, I think that brand partnerships with online courses and bootcamps are great opportunity to put out a more nuanced message and manage the expectations of aspiring designers. Whether you are involved in brand collaborations or sell your own course materials, use your platform with sense and ask yourself if your content piece actually helps the industry and aspiring designers or if it just helps your vanity metrics.

I’m hopeful that with the right expectation management and an adjustment in how juniors designers enter the market, the jobmarket for entrylevel designers can become more healthy. I see a responsibility in that for bootcamps and online courses, aspiring designers and content creators.

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*In this article I speak specifically about UX Design, but this can also include other design roles such as product design, UI design, UX/UI design and the 100 other jobtitles people came up with over the years.

**If you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘Great Resignation’ I suggest you check out this wikipedia article: Great Resignation on Wikipedia