UX Portfolios for Juniors

This morning I came across a post from Medium entitled “Building a UX portfolio without experience”

*pause*, *groan*, *sigh with frustration*, *facepalm* and *breathe*.

Obviously this is an idiotic thing to write, never mind to attempt. On more fronts than you might think.

Juniors with some experience

Even if you have a body of work, if you actually do UX (and not UX/UI design) then the important, UX parts of your work - the pieces that reveal the inner most failures of your previous clients and that architected tested, valuable solutions that gave your clients the upper hand in a competitive market place - these are things you will need to carefully redact and share selectively, not turn into a portfolio you post out like a window cleaning flyer. Any UX worth its weight is sensitive, competitive information, not to be freely shared without integrity. Portfolios work for creative designers, not for UXers.

Juniors with no experience

If you have no experience, don’t attempt to create a some BS portfolio. No decent UX manager, in any good UX environment that you’d actually want a job at, will be impressed.

Best Advise

Instead attempt to show you understand the UX process and its scope. Be honest about the things you don’t know and express that you are aware of them. Show you're eager to learn. Show examples of your early efforts to recreate and understand the UX process. Things like deliverable artefacts. Impress the hiring manager with your passion, work ethic, out of the box thinking (on any topic), show how you naturally do not take anything at face value, how you naturally question and research things in your own life, how you test assumptions, how you read, learn and question validity in any environment. Talk about examples of humility and integrity, about data, not opinions.

Your portfolio, as a junior with no experience, is your approach to life and the challenges it puts before us. Be that work or social challenges. How you disect and rationalise these is great portfolio when you have no UX experience.

NB: If you have no experience, do not blog on your UX expertise. It will come off as arrogant, not enlightened. This is your time to learn, not teach.

Good UX managers are far more interested in your reading and your questions about what you have learned so far. There's a LOT of contradictory BS written out there about UX - this is a great way to hone and show off your objective, rational, critical thinking skills and those are worth more than a thousand portfolios.

Learn, rationalise, challenge, repeat. Do not just believe what you're told!

Take Away

As a hiring manager I can tell you that this approach is much more compelling and would put you instantly in the top 5% of candidates for me - without seeing some BS portfolio. Rational questions are far more impressive than quoting loads of the faux UX wisdom out there.

Frankly I'd take a junior with lots of insightful questions over a junior with a few answers and a portfolio any day.

#ux #userexperience #uxjunior #uxportfolio #uxsanctuary