"How do I get into UXR?"

One of my favorite things to do here as late is to go onto Reddit where I serve others by being a source of truth about User Experience Research (hereafter for brevity: UXR). I am noticing here, around every three months (I suspect when the General Assembly classes “graduate”) the same questions coming up over and over again, so I thought I do folks a solid, and if they find themselves on LinkedIn for source material on the field, I would provide my point of view on the questions I hear most often, both on there, and from new people that I mentor.

Do I need to go to a bootcamp/certificate program in order to get into the field?

No. A thousand times no. Everything you need to learn is right in front of you on the world wide web. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: UXR cannot be schooled into. In other words, a masters/Ph.D. don’t help you a bit, ultimately. Anyone who tells you their certificate is going to get you through my door is trying to sell you the degree without teaching you anything. Don’t feel bad if you’ve already fallen for this…I did too, but it was with a school called Brooks Institute of Photography…I’m STILL paying off loans from there, and they don’t even exist. Lesson I learned from that experience: any school promising glitz and glamour without explicitly saying that you need to work hard to succeed is pulling your leg.

Read on as to what to do instead of bootcamps/certificate programs or a doctorate… (and save yourself thousands and thousands of dollars)

How do I get into UX as a career?

Like I mentioned above, you cannot degree your way into the field. It always makes me a little sad when I get a Ph.D. from an Ivy school who is about to graduate with the ultimate academic degree and then write to me asking this very question. The answer is quite simple.

1)   Get dialed in with local UX meetup groups and such. If you live in a place without one, start one! When you attend, speak up…ask questions…get to know people. If you’ve never been a UXR before but you want to learn the craft, definitely say so! No one will judge you for being curious about a career. Be friendly, buy a round or two, listen to the office gossip going on around you, and the stich-n-bitch about management, expectations, deliverables, and office culture.

a.    This will teach you two things right off the bat:

            i.    It will inform the work culture you want to thrive in…

           ii.    It will give you some initial friends so that if you DO go work there, you’ve got some folks to eat lunch with. Believe me, culture matters!

2)   Get a mentor (or five) who are already in the field: I learned the value of this when I was coming up. I cannot stress how important it is for you to have a mentor, and then when you come up and want a job – to have people that you mentor as well in the field. I have tons of folks that I mentor, but only like 5-7 who keep in regular contact with me, who by & large don’t ask me nearly as many questions as they should in order to learn something valuable from me. I have found, when I mention this to juniors and interns they’re like, “They don’t really want to hear from lil’ ol’ me…” and then they email their first one and they’re shocked that people are so willing. 

The truth is, at a senior level, we don’t know (or just aren't mindful, day to day) that other people who aren’t our bosses are watching us. It is therefore not unusual for us to be flattered a bit when someone asks us about what we do, how we do it, and why. Seriously, try this out! It’s worth both your times! Find a person in a company you admire, ask to connect, and then just write an honest letter to the effect of, “Hi there, I’m looking to get into UXR. I love the company you work for and I happen to be looking for mentors in the field, would you be willing to be my mentor as I come up in the world?” Everyone has mentors in this world. To get into this world, you will need them too. They will tell you when jobs come open, help you with your portfolio and resume, and so on.

3)   Volunteer with startups to do UXR – even if you do it for free:

One thing you’ll hear a lot of seasoned UXR’s grouch about is the fact that they don’t have buy in from management or from the company culture. Part of that starts with where the company has its beginnings. If User Research is demonstrated them in a high fidelity way when the company is in its infancy, there is a good chance that UXR will have value during the entire lifespan of that company. Get in on the ground floor then and really make an effort to present the best research deliverables you know how – a lot of what you’d learn in bootcamps/cert programs are going to be learned through failing those companies and trying again. Yes, you’ll likely need to have/get a sh*t job while you do this work voluntarily – but every single product you put forth to influence and drive the design of the startup will be worth its weight in gold when you hear the laments of those that went boot camping because it was safer than volunteering for a startup.

The other thing is this: A ton of startups feel like they cannot afford good quality user research, so they don’t bother. Doing it for them for free will teach you how to perform UXR on a shoestring budget (or less). Forget lean research…do starving research. Produce high quality deliverables without spending the company’s (or your) valuable capital…because when you get that senior or lead job in Enterprise, you’ll find they value your ability to save them money on research above all else. And don’t be afraid or turn down the ability to do internal UXR as a way to streamline business processes and programs…some of the best work I’ve done to date is with internal user experience…not every bit of UXR has to do with external users, much can be found right in the home office.

Now I know what some of you are saying, “Great Joel – but I live in BFE Kansas – there is no startup culture here!” Well the trend nowadays is to let people work remotely. So, in fact, you can very well test an enterprise project in a small town. Lots of companies (especially startups) prefer workers who possess the self-starting capability to do work from home (except my present company…who are still in the 1980’s on the subject). So do not let distance scare you away…and by the way – every single UXR I’ve ever hired on to be on my teams have had some period where they’ve done freelance field work. It is the realest experience you can get and there is no shortage of startups, so get after it.

4)   Build your network: This is one of those “last but certainly not least” ones. I’ve had people that have gone through bootcamps/cert programs where the “professor” tells them halfway through the course that the candidate’s network; not the certification is going to get them their first job in UX. Knowing that now, as you sit there and think about paying for a bootcamp or certification program – do you really think it’s worth it now? Like I said at the top – you cannot school your way into this line of work…you need to do it the old-fashioned way, shill for freelance jobs, build your network of contacts, build and refine your portfolio. UX is a small group of people that work, and a whole bunch of people that want to do it better than we can who are bending the locked doors with every push.  To be one of us, it helps to know a bunch of us (back to the mentor thing) – you have to apprentice under a UXR unit to really get your bearings, similar to the way a plumber or a welder comes up in their profession. Just as there is no doctorate for plumbing…there is similarly no doctorate for User Experience Research (believe me, I’ve looked)

Every single time you do research for a startup, there is the understanding that the product you produce can be used by that company in order to drive user-centered design, but the return on that for you should be that you can then use that project in your portfolio, and utilize those bosses you have on the project as contacts to lead you to other jobs for you to do the same thing. And if that’s not understood from the getgo, then you best mention it now so you know where you stand.

5)   (and one to grow on) Develop your ability to create, organize, and distribute a library of your findings. There hasn’t been a single senior researcher I’ve hired that doesn’t have a solid library skillset under their belt – it is an essential part of this job. What is more important to me than just if a candidate can do research, is if a candidate can synthesize existing research they’ve done and then can identify gaps for applicable teams. I don’t care if your medium is SharePoint, or confluence, or a 3rd party vendor, or Google Drive or whatever it is, be able to show your work and where in other work streams it has been most effective in influencing other work.

So those are the two big questions I get more and more every day. I hope that I’ve helped you understand your options better and maybe give you some insight behind the curtain, as it were, of my (our) profession that you’re trying to make entry into. There are a few of us who know that our time in these chairs are limited, that someone is bound to follow us, so we must facilitate your transition into those junior roles, as the J/UXRs get promoted into S/UXR roles, so our job is to prepare you, potential research candidate, to know what to expect as we move forward in our respective enterprises.

I imagine a good number of my colleagues will comment on this, and offer their own takes on this writing. Read all of them, if you can, because their insight is as valuable as mine are.

Good luck! We believe in YOU!!!