UX Challenge #4: Create your personal UX blueprint


UX Challenge #4: Create your personal UX blueprint

We’ve often heard from UX bootcamp grads who work with us that they end up receiving a lot of clarity on how to approach the UX job search after talking to us. They learn to focus on their core strengths and create their own personal blueprint for breaking into UX.

We’ve worked with UX bootcamp grads from General Assembly, CareerFoundry, Springboard, DesignLab, Avocademy and more. Here are some issues that we’ve noticed with their UX career transition:

  1. A lot of UX bootcamp grads with 2-5+ years of previous professional expertise in other fields end up taking a UX bootcamp and then go right back to starting from the beginning when it comes to the UX job search. We see them apply to junior level UX research and UX design roles, when in reality they could potentially qualify for more mid-senior level UX roles.
  2. A lot of UX bootcamp grads end up having cookie-cutter portfolios with identical case studies that dozens of other UX bootcamp grads also have in their portfolios. This makes it very hard for them to stand out from the crowd during the UX job search. They have identical startup or consulting projects in their portfolios that other students who’ve taken the same UX bootcamp also showcase in their UX portfolios.

A lot of UX bootcamp grads don’t learn enough UX research, business strategy, and entrepreneurship. This is the secret sauce to really presenting oneself as a mid to senior level UX designer or UX researcher. It’s important to understand the business model for the product or service you are helping to design and build. This means really understanding monetization strategy, tech and operations constraints, as well as how the business and the product scales over time.

We take on a very different approach to helping women break into tech and land 6-figure UX jobs.

What do we do differently? We help students create their own personalized UX blueprint by helping them focus on their strengths.

  1. We analyze students’ past professional expertise to help them focus on a specific UX career path within a specific industry. For example, Valerie came to us with over 10+ years of experience in admin work, project management, and healthcare during her career as a physical therapist. After speaking with her, we realized that she had a wealth of UX research and service design expertise from her past work. Valerie created a platform for PTs to assign HW to their patients for better outcomes during her time within our 4-month Live UX course. After graduating she focused on applying to UX research roles within healthcare and ended up landing a UX Lead role at CVS corporate! Her hiring manager was impressed by her healthcare background and leadership skills when it came to building her own healthcare platform!
  2. We help you scope a UX project based on your strengths, expertise, and passions. We worked with Ilona to transform her nonprofit background. She created a platform for nonprofits to share resources to communities while she was taking our 4-Month Live UX course. After graduating, Ilona leveraged her freelancing and project management skills to consult for 2-3 startups for both UX research and UX design. A year later, she chose to focus on full-time UX roles and is currently a Senior UX Designer at Keller Williams. Ilona is also an incredible storyteller and educator. You can check out some of her Figma tutorials on YouTube. She is also an instructor with Ideate Labs and has expertise working in UX for startups, UX consulting, and UX corporate work!
  3. Our curriculum covers UX research, business strategy and entrepreneurship to help you land mid-senior level UX roles. We helped Aliyah rebrand her marketing background and helped her focus on a UX research career path during her job search. This helped her land a mid-level UX Research role with Reddit AND also helped her continue to build her startup ideas that she developed while studying at Ideate Labs. You can hear about how she balances entrepreneurship with corporate work here.

So our challenge for you today is to build your own personalized UX blueprint! We want to help you achieve some clarity and focus when it comes to the UX job search.

  • Ask yourself: What are some transferable skill sets and strengths you have from past or current non-UX work or education? We talk about finding transferable skills and strengths in this video.
  • Ask yourself: What does your dream UX job look like? What industries are you particularly interested in?

Book a call with us to tell us YOUR answers to these questions! We want to help you create a personalized blueprint for breaking into UX, leveraging your existing skill sets and expertise.

Take advantage of the 1:1 mentorship we offer! Book a 20-minute call with us here and we can brainstorm an UX project with you to work on within our 4-Month Live UX course. We really recommend taking our 4-Month Live UX course starting on September 22 to land your dream UX job. The course helps you really take the time to understand your particular skill sets and interests in relation to a specific UX career path…which is crucial for finding the right UX job for you, based on your personality and interests!

What’s different about our course? We help you land 6-figure UX job offers in 7 months, or coach you till you get it. We provide 1:1 UX mentorship for 7 months, and group-coaching office hours within a supportive alumni community for life.

Register for the 4-month Live UX course by Thursday, September 12 to save $900 on the tuition price (our regular tuition rate of $7,350 becomes $6,450).

Here’s what you get access to for FREE when you register by paying the $490 course registration fee:

Our Redesign Your UX Resume & Portfolio online course ($790 value)

Our “Create a Career in UX Design” E-book ($150 value)

Hurry up on that registration because we have a limited number of seats in our cohort and seats run out fast! Save your seat today by registering today.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya & Khrys

P.S. Refer a friend to this newsletter if you like our content! We create our content with love and care, with you in mind. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to access 180+ free UX lessons and join our Slack community with over 7000 active UX learners! Always rooting for your success :)

P.P.S. Subscribe to our premium junior UX jobs board to get access to 200+ fresh junior UX jobs before we release 50 of them to our free UX jobs board. Also, stay up to date with current UX for AI & AI for UX trends and get our AI guidelines and AI prompts to help you with your UX projects!

P.P.P.S. Are you a UX bootcamp grad in the thick of the UX job search? It is an extremely competitive market and we can help you stand out. Book a 60-minute UX resume rewrite session or a 90-minute UX portfolio review/rewrite session to start landing interviews at Fortune 500 companies today. We will grant you access to our repository of UX resume and UX case study templates that have helped our alumni land UX roles at Reddit, PNC, Capital One, CVS, and more.

P.P.P.P.S. Are you a UX career changer who’s still learning UX? In today’s competitive job market, it might not be enough to complete the Google Coursera course (although that’s a good starting point!). It can also be overwhelming to sort through hundreds of different UX resources. We recommend registering for Ideate Labs Live UX course to get a personalized UX education that helps you land your dream UX job.

We deliver UX design & tech trends, case studies and stories to your inbox once a week. No sales. No blasts.
Unsubscribe · Preferences

UX & Tech Stories for Women

Join a community of 25K ladies. We deliver UX design, UX research, inclusive design, and tech trends, stories, case studies, challenges, and news all to your inbox once a week. No sales. Just tailored news and stories for you and how you can apply what you are learning to your personal and professional life.

Read more from UX & Tech Stories for Women
Do Something Great neon sign

UX Challenge #5: dream UX job? If you’ve been stuck with creating your personalized blueprint for breaking into UX, then we recommend thinking through the vision of where you want to be in the next 1-2 years. Let’s do a manifesting exercise for a minute. Forget about the current state of the job market right now. And don’t let your fears around the UX job search stop you from dreaming BIG. Now ask yourself: What would your dream UX job be? And give your answer as if you don’t have to work...

person working on blue and white paper on board

Anatomy of a UX portfolio I've noticed that both junior and established UX designers and UX researchers often have trouble creating a compelling UX portfolio with interesting UX case studies. Here's some common pitfalls:❌ They just add pictures of visual UX deliverables on their case study page, or even worse, they showcase the visuals with little or no description explaining their design process. This results in a very superficial UX case study that doesn't really uncover their thought...

two women sitting at a table with laptops

UX challenge #3: Break up with your toxic job If you are reading this, you are probably feeling a little burned out by a current toxic job or past toxic job that has inspired you to seek a career change and pivot into UX design or UX research. We are here to tell you that it is okay to break up with your current toxic job or situation, if that’s what you need. We just recommend having a plan to go about doing it strategically, having something new lined up before you quit! But first: what are...