How I became a UX Designer with no experience or design degree | chunbuns

hi I'm Christine today I'll be talking about how I became a UX designer without experience or design degree a year ago I wrote a medium article on the same topic which to this day is the most viewed and searched article that I've written in the past year and so I thought I'd do a deeper dive into my story with this video so there are three things that I'll mainly cover in this video one being my background and my career transition second I'll talk about what you absolutely need in order to become a UX designer and third is how long it took me to land my first full-time 2x design job so a little bit about my background I studied chemistry in college and graduated with a bachelor's in Kevin right out of college I got my first full-time job here in San Francisco as a communication specialist at a beauty retail company I was doing a million different things because it was a start-up I was doing public relations influencer marketing email copywriting and so after a full year I put that job without another job lined up I did this because I was so burnt out from my startup experience but also I didn't want to just rush into things anymore because that's what I did with retail marketing I thought I really enjoyed this field and after you're working there I didn't feel like I had a career path so in my next career transition I didn't want to make a hasty decision first I wasn't getting paid for how much I was working and second I didn't feel like my skills were being valued in this industry so the two main things that I was looking for in my next role was a higher paying job to sustain a life in San Francisco and a job where I was channeling my creativity more where I was critically thinking about the problems and where I felt like my skills were valued so during that time where I was unemployed I started grabbing coffee and hopped on phone calls with a bunch of people that I messaged on LinkedIn but also friends and friends I asked them what they did in their day-to-day jobs and this is where I met a lot of UX designers who transitioned into UX without a design after talking with them I was convinced that this was something that I would potentially be good at I really liked the fact that there was a promising career track us designers get paid much more than visual or graphic designers so all in all what got me interested in UX design initially was the high pay and the high impact that I would have as a designer so what do you absolutely need in order to become a designer it's a portfolio and if you don't know what a portfolio is portfolio is just a website that showcases your case studies a case study is a design project so if you went through a design school or an art school your curriculum and your classes already have projects so it's easier for you to come up with a portfolio but if you are like me who didn't have a design background it's really hard to come up with your own projects by yourself so there are two main ways that you can build a portfolio if you don't have experience or if you don't have a design degree the first way that you can go about this is enroll in a bootcamp there are places like general assembly or trade craft where they offer full-time courses or you can look into springboard or design lab which are online courses that you can take at your own pace something to note here is our certification does not matter in this industry so whether you get a design certification from an ex boot camp recruiters will not care so don't get hung up on the certification toe certain extent degrees don't matter but it is preferable that you have a bachelor's degree so I took the route of doing the 10-week full immersive program through a general assembly and I mainly did this because I didn't want to juggle having a part-time job with a part-time boot camp trying to do everything all at once I just can't function that way so I thought it was worth it to invest upfront and I knew that UX design was a higher paying job so I would get a high ROI return on investment later and so I thought that dropping 10k for this boot camp was worth it and I had talked with a lot of alums who got jobs out of general assembly as well but I understand that some of you might not be in that financial situation where you can afford 10k so it really depends on your own situation but I have the flexibility to be able to do that because of my parents so I'm really grateful for their support at that hard time so the second way that you can go about building your portfolio is a lot more time consuming and it's a lot harder you basically have to just teach yourself everything whether it's through Google or connecting with other designers to take on side projects by collaborating with your friends who might have a start-up idea and they need some design input or you can take on a personal project by redesigning your favorite app or a website the downside of self teaching yourself is that you can lose momentum easily because you're not as motivated what I really appreciated about general assembly was that I had a cohort that I can share my struggles with that we can go through this transition together and I also really liked my instructors who answered a lot of questions for me and I just had this peace of mind knowing that I'm not alone in this journey so I thought that going through bootcamp was worth it with that said though I have a lot of friends who went through the same bootcamp and are still struggling to find jobs I don't want to set the expectation that everyone gets a job out of a bootcamp that is just not true whichever route you take just remember that the number one thing that will land you a job is how good your case studies are so my advice to you here would be to look at a lot of the case studies written by designers already working in the field this will help you understand how to frame your own case study better and also you want to learn from the experts it's not going to help you if you look at a bunch of other bootcamp grads portfolios because they're kind of in the same boat as you and you're not going to learn as much how long did it take you to find a full-time UX design job it took me one month right after I finished my bootcamp I spent a whole month updating my portfolio and building my website that is one thing that all these boot camps won't teach you is how to build your portfolio which actually takes up a lot of time and googling and once I felt like my portfolio was ready I started applying to jobs on LinkedIn and in late December I got my first phone interview and in early January I got my first offer as a full-time UX designer so again it took me one month to find a job after my portfolio was ready but it took me about four or five months to do a complete career transition I know that a lot of you had asked me more questions in my Instagram DMS that I try to answer in this video but couldn't please keep posted in my future videos hit subscribe and follow me on Instagram message me your questions and I will try to answer them in my future content my camera is running out of batteries [Music]

Channel: chunbuns

Views: 798,638

Rating: 4.8714433 out of 5

Keywords: chunbuns, how to become a ux designer, how to become a ux designer with no experience, how to become a ui designer, how to become a ui/ux designer, how to become a ui ux designer, how to become a ui developer, how to become a ux researcher, how to become a ui ux designer with no experience, ux designer, ui designer, ux designer for beginners, ux design, ui design, product design, career advice, becoming a product designer, ui design tips, user experience design

Id: Poo4AI2expA

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 02 2019