In late 2010 I set out to find a new UX job in London. I’d like to share with you some of the things I encountered on my quest for a workplace.
1. Know yourself.
The first thing I learned was that, although the job title might be the same, User Experience Designer can mean many things depending on the environment you are looking at. A start-up might expect you to be knowledgeable in user testing whilst also capable of doing some front-end coding. An agency might expect that you’ve have created and presented pitches, whilst client-side might expect you to design email campaigns as part of your job.
Because all of these different expectations it is important to know what you want, what you can do and where you might find the most realistic fit for those two. In my case I found that what I want, –growth in my knowledge and skills in designing advanced web-applications– was quite hard to achieve with my mix of skills (best to be described as senior web-designer). This showed itself by the variety of salaries that companies were willing to pay me for roughly the same job title. Best advice would be to contact a more senior practitioner, who knows about your work, and gain a good understanding about your strengths and interests.
More to read:
How to get a job at a webdesign agency.
2. Have a portfolio
You might have a well written CV, hundreds of connections on LinkedIn and Twitter, and a well maintained blog, but without a good portfolio you’re unlikely to land an interview. I would advise to have three versions available: one pdf version that you can send out to recruiters, an online version that you can link to, and a set of printouts that you can take with you to an interview. You’d be surprised to find out how many times it’s quite a challenge to get online during a job interview.
As for what should be in your portfolio, have a look at Jason Mesut’s rant over at London IA. As you can see from my portfolio there is still room for progress. It’s not completely clear which story I want to tell: am I a visual designer with some IxD experience, or a beginning IA with some visual design experience, also the items seem to be in a random order. The positive feedback that I received was mainly on my sketches and more conceptual work; which probably proves the point that the process is more insightful to look at than the end product.
More to read:
To portfolio or not to portfolio that is the question
3. Recruiters
As soon as you’ve uploaded your CV on Monsterboard you will get plenty of phone calls from hungry recruiters, all of them will promise you that you are exactly the right match for their inspiring position. Therefore make sure you’ve done your ‘know thyself homework’ and are able to quickly judge if the proposed job is matching your criteria. From my experience, there are some recruiters who are really good, who are interested in you and are willing to invest time to follow up on conversations. Here are some agencies that took the decency (or precaution) to ask me to come over for a talk: ZebraPeople, Futureheads, Propel London, Ecom recruitment and Vanburn at ITHR. Don’t forget, however, that many companies don’t (or even refuse) to work with recruiters, so it’s worth doing some active searching yourself.
4. Automate your search
No need to keep on visiting websites to hope for an update; modern technologies come with plenty of options to stay in the loop without working too hard. The following services allow you to sign up for an email update on your search query: the Guardian, Monster, the Ladders. And these services you can follow by RSS: uxwork, UK UPA jobs, London IA jobs, etc. What also might be an idea is to search Twitter for UX jobs and to choose the ‘show tweets nearby’ tab.
5. Linked In
LinkedIn was for me the site where I kept coming back to. It has the ability to do background checks on the companies and the people who are interviewing you. Also more and more companies are actively using LinkedIn as a recruitment tool.
6. Quality over quantity
At the moment there is a strong demand for UX designers in London, therefore if you aren’t too sure about a company don’t worry too much about turning down a job offer. In the end it’s better to only go to job interview with companies you are interested in, better one well-researched and prepared interview then ten careless conversations.
more to read:
Improve your changes of a job in UX
Grow your UX skill set
Things you need to know to get an IA/UX job
Getting hired
Please let me know in the comments how you’ve experienced finding work and which knowledge you’ve found essential. And if you have some free time, maybe now is the right moment to brush up your skills.
Thanks Sjors, it is always useful to have the best out of many links and concrete examples and tips. You’re really becoming the go-to guy when looking for tools, useful websites and stuff. Keep collecting and evaluating!
Brilliant and spot on. One thing I will add is doing job research on twitter is becoming more useful in recent times. And just getting the word out and letting people know helps as well.
Nice one, Sjors.
The know-yourself part is the most essential bit of all. I’ve been through hundreds of job interviews the past 6 years of being self-employed, and landing a freelance job was always easy. I just went to every interview I would get and would just be quite careless and never prepared for it. However, every interview for a permanent position would end up in failure, simply because of not really knowing where I stand and what I want and who I am. Having now figured that out, I landed some interviews at companies that actually appeal to me, with jobs that really match me. And guess what? Reached the finishing line straight on. Knowing yourself is mandatory for your confidence and appearance, when finding a permanent place.
When it comes to job boards, I’d never use Monsterboard. Their CV system is horrendous. I only use JobSite and JobServe. And yes… once you’re uploaded to there, you are absolutely flooded by calls and mails from recruiters who say you are the best ever. After a while you become apt at filtering out in only 2 sentences if they are crap or not. However, I’ve never felt the need to actually meet a recruiter in person. They are quite a burden when you make it through the interviews and get into negotiation stage. They block any direct conversation with the company making negotiating quite a pain, since you never know what the company really responds, or what the recruiter really tells them.
very good points, especially that of knowing yourself. you have to know exactly what you want so you know what to look for!
One thing I did to automate my job search was to use Yahoo’s Pipes service. I went to sites like Authentic Jobs, Monster, Craigslist, and so on and search for “ux” and “user experience” in my area. Some sites offer RSS feeds for searches and others don’t; Pipes can deal with both scenarios, so I used that to create a unified RSS feed that I could check every morning. Subscribing to multiple job sites gave a fair few duplicates and also really drove home exactly how many companies don’t actually understand what user experience is.
Knowing yourself is, as you’ve said, so important. Knowing what you like doing, and are good at makes applying for positions and the interview process much easier.
Hope the job is going well.