 Okay. Welcome. Hello. Thank you for joining the third and final UX design industry night panel. My name is Christina Friedrich. I'm the manager of credential programs here at Emily Carr Continuing Studies. And industry nights offer recent graduates and current students of the user experience design program valuable insights into industry as they start on new and exciting career paths. We also want to welcome members of the broader Emily Carr community who have joined us today and anybody else from the general public who might be joining us for tonight's panel. This event is hosted by Emily Carr Continuing Studies, and I'm joining you today from the unseeded territories of the Musqueam Squamish and Slewa Tooth Nations. Joining virtual events offers the opportunity for us to connect across many different traditional territories and lands. As a guest of this digitally mediated event, I encourage you to also take a moment to acknowledge the land on which you live and where you're joining from today. Breaking into UX can be both challenging and rewarding. Today you will hear from junior designers and alumni of the program who followed different paths and applied their skills to find success. Whether developing and refining a portfolio, applying for internships and jobs, participating in hackathons or founding their own companies, our panelists tonight will be sharing their insights and journeys into the UX industry. I would like to welcome Julia Fajardo, Mackenzie Michke, Nicole Waldron, and Jared Zeckel. We're going to start off with each panelist introducing themselves and then move into general questions we've prepared. If members of the audience have questions, please feel free to type them into the Q&A window and we will allow time to bring these to the panel for responses. To get us started tonight, I'm going to pass it over to Julia. Okay, hi everybody. I'm really excited. I think this is amazing. I'm sad that I didn't do this when I was changing careers, but I'm so happy that I can really provide my experience to new designers. So, sorry. Here. Okay, perfect. So, my name is Julia, and if you see an age is a silent age from Columbia, so the age is silent. I'm a queer Colombian woman. I've been living in Canada for the last 13 years. I worked for IRCC in the public sector in the transformation wing as a UX designer. She's something a little more about me. I have worked in retail for the last 10 years. I have lived in four different countries, and I have two passion projects that are all about to empower people, inspire people through photojournalism. So mostly athletes and motorcyclists. I do run a motorcycle, so that's why. And then a big one, why did I ended up choosing UX design? So I was an opponent alive that I needed a career that used my strengths and passion. I want to find a career that allowed me to grow and get new challenges. I want to find a workplace that looked me in a holistic way. I was definitely ready for a change in the right mind space to do it. And looking for a place to empower others, a career that allowed me to do that. Something else about me, maybe some values that I live the life by, and I want to start saying why did I choose this? This was one of the most important things when I changed careers that determined where I wanted to be and when I wanted to go. So I have adaptability, authenticity, connection, growth and leadership. And to just finalize, I just want to tell you a little bit about my UX related projects. So Cherry and Tech is a tech squad. I'm the senior designer there. He's a small group, so I can call myself like that. ADP Liz, I'm mentorship. I have a YouTube channel in Spanish about changing careers in your late 30s. And I have a UX postcast to that is to be new into UX design. So that's me. Thank you. Thank you so much. We'll pass it on to Mackenzie next. That was a great presentation. I don't have a presentation, but I'm also excited to be here and I'm super stoked that Emily cars continuing study program still did something even though we're all virtual. I think it's important as the recent grads of this program I really loved that experience with the industry nights, but more about myself. I started off actually as a psych undergrad and graduated with a psych degree but before even graduating was like I don't want to do, I don't want to counsel this is not going to happen. So I found my way into a startup because everybody's hiring at startups, but I actually ended up in sales. It turns out, but again, I guess I'm what I'm trying to describe as my very unclear path towards design. But yeah, so while I was there I was exposed to product design and developers. So I started to think about Oh, this is like super cool and interesting why have I never thought about this I've always loved graphic design. I've always loved people. I just went one way versus going the other way but maybe this is the time. So I quit after two months. I ended up at Emily cars program cried while like while we tried to learn coding but love the design work. And then found myself graduated and looking for a job. So everything I happened to be painting houses to make ends meet before finding a job in UX, and one of the contractors on my job site, had a brother in law who actually was one of the founders of turtle design agency here in Vancouver. So I met with him, and I was off an internship, and that's how everything moved forward so two and a half years later I was still there. I was super closely with super senior designers which is like an invaluable experience there was only about eight of us by the time I left so it was just a really intimate setting to learn what I loved and didn't love so much about design and where I want to go next. And now I work in house at a startup called legible or e reading platform so if anyone's interested in you reading go sign up little plug. Yeah, and so now I'm learning what I love about in house it's a lot more in depth I'm finding than the agency work I've done in the past. That's a very quick meandering introduction about how I got into design. Thank you so much. How about Nicole next. Hi everyone. I'm also a fellow alumni of Emily car. It's great to be back and to kind of support the program and see all the students here it's I always find it super inspiring. And so, if you ever want to reach out and ask questions separately I'll always feel free. So about my journey. I kind of got started within a technical degree so I came from a very technical family, my mom took computer science degree my dad took a computer science degree and so did my sister. So that was kind of the path that I was just like, somewhat bread for, and then I went in that direction, as I kind of got to the point of my degree where I had to get into an internship and start looking at jobs. I was able to land a really cool position at SAP in kind of like data and visualization but kind of working more so on the back end kind of database stuff, etc. And I definitely was not passionate about it so I was trying to find ways that I could like navigate that towards the items within our team that I was kind of more intrigued by so that turned out to be more of like data visualization and talking with our internal students and kind of figuring out what their pain points were and how we could kind of solve those so I felt I was like naturally going towards that direction. And then I was lucky to be able to participate in a really cool two day long design thinking workshop that SAP hosts they call it they're like intrapreneurship workshop so they kind of bring everyone together and problem solve for two days straight it's a really intense two days but it's really fun it's kind of like the design thinking version of a hackathon. And that's where I was like, wow, this is really really cool how can I do this more. And that's what drove me to go back to school right after I finished school. So when I got to Emily car and took the interaction design program and kind of combine my technical experience with the user experience side and brought that together and that actually led me into kind of being in a product role. So I started out in a product role at a company called XM it made academic dental software. So they didn't necessarily have a lot of design or user experience happening at the company when I got there. My role was kind of bringing that to the company. So kind of looking at how we can problem solve and bring more of that process and thinking behind user centered design and bring the user to the forefront of our decision making and kind of kind of bringing that to the forefront, you know, got that rolling and happening at the at the whole company and it was really positive experience because it led me to having a new kind of dedicated role position, kind of created for me at a new start up so that led in a really cool direction and then at the startup I was hired for I had a role created for me and it's kind of blossomed from there but that I've kind of continued in that direction of just always proving the value of user experience design and the process and and research and data behind it as well. Thank you so much Nicole so maybe fewer tears for the coding course in your case. That one was easy for me. Yeah. I was like, great already done. Yeah. Everybody has things that are that come easy more easily than others so. Exactly I was, I was crying when everyone was so good at the design side. I don't know if this is for me. Thank you for sharing both of your tears. I think that's very important. And not as a segue but will now skip to Jared if you would like to provide your introduction. All right sounds good. Jared, I have been working in the industry for about three years now. I'm a volunteer alumni of my car. And also like everyone else here I had a very interesting journey into UX. Worked lots of different jobs and different career paths and service industry and film. And attempted entrepreneurship. The way I started in UX was I was building and prototyping physical products industrial design, as many of you know it. And so during that process, you know, you're kind of a one person army you're trying to do everything. And so you know building the website was one of those things and at the end of the day I found out that I really enjoyed working in a digital medium. It was much more satisfying and to be completely honest much cheaper than, you know, paying for 3d printed pieces all day. And yeah so after I found the, I was originally going to go into the inter. Sorry the industrial design program at Emily car and I found the interaction design program I didn't even realize that this was a thing that existed. I went into it, it's been a life changing experience. It's been a career that I never realized I could have and it's something that I do every day and I still love going in every day. I got my first job at a company local company called event base. They do large scale, you know 50,000 people events, obviously took a real tough term for the worst during the pandemic, you know, having 50,000 people in a room together not the greatest idea. And yeah so I started as a UI designer there and slowly worked up to a product designer. And currently I'm working at a company called rise people where we do payroll HR and benefit software all wrapped into one. So my day to day is mostly working on the design system building and maintaining that, as well as working on some projects that harmonize products across our sorry across our platform. So that's me. Great. Thank you so much everybody for those introductions. It's a great place for us to get started on some general questions. But I also have a couple of notes that maybe we can just kick off to start with. I mentioned, you know, the, the opportunity for you to basically create or have new positions created for you in these environments that maybe UX was never considered as a role. You found that that is something that was an exciting opportunity or has it been challenging to kind of convince a company that this is a role or a service or experience that would be helpful to bring to the company. Definitely. I would say it's been a bit of both I think the environment and the willingness for people to kind of take that information in really affects that experience as well. I know at the first company I kind of worked at which is XN. It was really helpful that I had kind of the support and trust of the leadership team to really help get that ball rolling. They did have one designer there who wasn't necessarily using UX processes but kind of the designer was really excited to kind of get into the UX side of things too. So there's just a lot of kind of positive momentum happening, which really helped make my job a lot easier. So I think I think there's always going to be challenges but getting that that stakeholder adoption is one of the biggest pieces. If you have a stakeholder who's just not interested at all, then that's going to make it quite a bit of a challenge. Thanks, Nicole. Do any of the other panelists have any experience with being able to sort of carve out a new role in a company or any similar types of experience that they want to share? I wanted to add something about Nicole. I haven't had that experience yet but working for the government what we're doing is really out of the box that is really like new. So in that first beginning of what we're doing in this product is how we're making sure that that data stakeholder believe what we're saying. So we did a lot of workshops, we did a lot of one-on-ones and I think building that communication and that trust between stakeholders and the design team and they can see that we really care about the user but we want to bring the business to, of course, 100%. I think that Berga is like a big window for people to understand who we are and that what we want. So for me I will say we are bringing what is design thinking into the government. So maybe a little bit. Yeah, that's great. There's somebody else named Christina who's joining. How interesting. I'll just keep going with some of our questions. So this is a general question for everybody on the panel. So UX design is a broad discipline. There are UX and UI designers, product designers, UX researchers, UX writers, and so on and so forth. How did you determine the direction of your career to target your job search when you were starting out? Jared, do you want to start us off? Oh, Mackenzie, you had your hand up. Take it away Mackenzie. Yeah, I actually, so this question is interesting because I found it easier to remove things I didn't want it. I knew I didn't want to do, especially as a designer who doesn't have like career experience when you're just starting out. It's really hard to know what that day to day actually looks like, but I did know the things I like to do. I really liked UX processes, as well as visual but I wasn't super keen on visual. So I was like, okay, I'll start leaning towards UX. I know I don't like coding. I know I don't like UX writing and like strict research. So I don't want to do those things. So that kind of helps guide those eliminating options basically. Yeah, I guess I'll jump in as well. I think that's a really good point that you made by eliminating the options that you don't want because I think I've always kind of had a few different titles where I'm like, I could fit into these types of roles. And I think especially for starting out, it was more so I know I'm not necessarily adapted the design side quite as much as others might be. And that's why I fell into more of a product analyst role, not because I wasn't interested in UX titles or UX roles, but more specifically because I was looking more for like user research and especially at the time, there weren't that many of those roles available. So I'm kind of looking at how, how like my expertise and what I learned from Emily Carr really fit into the specific needs of the job postings that were available at the time. I can go. It's like, are we, are we looking at each other? Okay. So I was going to say, I'm not an Emily Carr alumni. So I come from the bootcamp background. And I think for me, I always got so scared when recruiters or people ask me about this, like, what do you want to specialize like, I don't know, I just finished school. So I just think when McKenzie, you were saying like, what are my strengths and definitely what is not something that I'm not good at it. So again, English is my second language. So definitely nothing that it has to be with writing is not my strength. But I was finding what is some of the skills that I have from my past experience that I really can bring over and that are going to be definitely miss my strength. And that is going to be my differentiation between other people that haven't maybe have that much work experience as me. So working for me retail, I'm doing a solution problem every second in a bit, like I know how to do process like I can put them into practice I can do a lot of abt testing. So how I can use my communication skills to be a good UX designer so I feel like at the beginning and I will still consider myself a unicorn really my strengths go into communication pieces and tools and how to be adaptable to change. I don't know if that is enough but I'm a unicorn is still in the moment. Yeah, kind of, you know, breaking into the industry when you have zero tech experiences is extremely challenging and not going to lie to anybody here. And so, similar to McKenzie obviously there's there's the things you definitely don't want to be doing for me that was writing, not a good writer. For me I also recognize that you're going to, if you cast a wider net, you're going to get a much better, you know, more opportunities are going to come your way. And for my situation that kind of worked. I think most, you'll find that most positions will be doing a little bit of everything, especially on like lean startups, you're going to be doing like six different jobs. A bit of writing, a bit of research, a bit of UI, a bit of UX. And so you mean, after a few months or years of working in the industry, you might even realize that you want to do a direction that was completely different from the one that you originally sought out. So I mean, if you have a good manager, and hopefully you do in the future, they will 100% help you carve out a direction that you want to be working in. And you know also doing a little bit of everything is going to help you when you finally do get to narrow down your, your kind of job, because you kind of understand each role and how they interact with your role a little bit better than you know, when you've just kind of started out of school. And I think, for me personally just work better just cast a wide net see what comes my way, and I also had like $400 in my bank account by the time I got a job I was next to broke so I didn't really have much time to be picking choosey. Thanks everybody. Thank you Jared. I think this kind of folds nicely into another question that I have for everybody. How closely does your current position or your current title even or day to day experience map your expectations when you first started your UX journey. I was so excited. I finished the boot camp and is like, they say that I will get a job right away that is so easy. But I have to remember that it was coffee time so the jobs were limited to. I needed to find some experience without working so I ended up doing some passion practice on the side with developers and project managers that were in the same shoes at me so we start creating little thing that's cherry on tech today. I was really excited to realize that what I learned at school, it was so useful and hands on in what I was doing with my tech squad at the moment. And I think when I start working I realize that that little experience that I have in the tech squad have helped me so much to develop that skills that I had at the boot camp. Besides, of course, learning on the side reaching out going to conferences. And I think that's really for me it was a lot of what else can I do on the side to bring that experience to life. But honestly, I do everything that I learned at school at work that is for me amazing. So useful definitely you don't go in depth, it as you want to know it in the learning but for me is amazing that I can use every single skill that I learned. Yeah. I'll jump in as well. Thanks Julia. I, I think that for myself at the moment working at a startup. It goes kind of day today. Sometimes I'll be like yep this is super in line with what I plan to do. Other days I'm, you know, writing a blog and I'm wondering why I'm doing that. So, so it really goes kind of back and forth with expectations but I guess for myself, I knew working at a startup was going to kind of get get me into working on a whole bunch of different projects, which I actually really like the kind of dynamic work environment of having exposure to those different types I think that's really helping me kind of build my portfolio of skill set to to showcase like wow I can apply these processes and so many different areas whether it's communication design, or whether it's looking at product features or whether it's looking at solving a problem like user onboarding and user learning of the product to so it's it's really helped to kind of expose me to those different areas but if I if I kind of looked back to where I was when I first ended Emily Carr it's definitely not what I would have first hoped for myself but I wouldn't have wanted anything different now. Yeah, I'll pay back on that it's it's interesting with my first job out of the Emily Carr program at Turtle it was dead on what I thought it would be. But as your seniority grows and your experience grows, of course you start taking on different roles and maybe going towards more working as what more like managerial roles or things like that. I think it's one of the coolest thing about a startup culture, you very much are taking on a lot of different things. You can be helping with, you know, pro like defining process about your team actually works internally. But I have loved that close like UX is just so practical UX UI design so practical you're actually doing that work if that's going to be what you're going towards. Out of school I assume that I was gonna be spending most of my time doing card sorting exercises and making logos. I don't think I've made a single logo to date and I'm pretty happy with that. As of now. In my first roles UI designer, I did none of that stuff. I was mostly creating mockups with client assets and I was doing a lot of work with Xcode and Android Studio so vastly different from what we learned in school. And then when I moved into product design at the first company, there was a lot less research involved than what I expected. In my current role, there is much heavier focus on research which I certainly appreciate. So, you know, every company is going to be different. Every role is going to be different. It's all contextual. But, you know, I think change adapting continue learning with the company but you can also influence how they do things you know if you think it's important to do a certain sort of exercise to or or tests or use even specific programs and technology like Maze or Sigma like whatever kind of design tools you like to use absolutely like throw your weight around and kind of not depend but influence what your company does. Thanks everyone that actually came up at yesterday's panel, which was talking about internships and interviews. And there was this this idea that, you know, you have to not be afraid to ask for what it is that you want to either identify like I'm really enjoying working here how do I get a permanent role or I would really enjoy working on this project or, you know, trying to do so have have you generally as a panel you collectively have had those experiences where you've been able to kind of make those requests and sort of asked to be able to participate in a way that maybe you weren't originally intended to participate or hired to work on a project and how how was that experience for you. I can go. I can go. Um, so I think for me because I was brand new into UX design and brand new into like tech into public sector I think it was just so much at the beginning for me to kind of take in. But again, I knew what it was good at I think again for me was a lot of us to learning about UX so how can I use my strengths and what I've been good for a long time that I can really use that at my current job so I created, for example, how we're going to work with developers so I did a workshop about design thinking and developer hands like handoff. That was a good one. I do a lot of like communication between teams how to make the team have fun for me, I feel like the team is engaged and the team is having a good time. I understand who you are and how do you like to communicate. These processes going to help so much when we are in a screen team and when we're having one on ones. So for me I think that's something that I have include that maybe is not that much UX related but it's more about surface skills and communication. Yeah I find. I don't know if it's just the industry we're in and there's a lot of startups and smaller companies that there are massive companies to those so what am I saying but I've ended up in smaller companies, where it is a lot easier to to carve your own path and talk to your managers about what you want to do. So that's something to consider to and when you're looking for your first job. If you don't know what you want 100% do maybe look in that direction. Yeah. Yeah, I think from my perspective. I've probably been in a lot of unique scenarios where it's really about pinpointing what's not working well and kind of spearheading the problem fixes for that because I learned very quickly that if I'm not going to do it then likely no one is so kind of just taking ownership of those problems that I'm discovering and and really finding ways to to make them, them happen in terms of finding solutions for them so I think that that's really important if you find pieces of work that you're really passionate about kind of make prove that value of it and make that project happen for yourself because if you're not doing it. It might not be done. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's lots of opportunities to kind of you don't have to be pushy but you know, at the end of the day, if something's not working for you. It's a problem. You know you're a designer, you should be working on problems on the product you can also be working on problems in your day to day workspace. What's the solution you know you don't need an HR moderator to figure out that you don't like doing something very much and you can work with your managers and with your teammates to improve it you know whether it means that you know maybe you have to do stuff outside of your job description or just maybe take some time after work to really kind of discover what the solution is. It's there's plenty of opportunities to to, you know, first of all have a conversation but then also like come up with ideas and solutions and documentation to kind of work out some sort of process that everyone wins. Thank you so much. I think also if you're finding problems in systems or processes the likelihood is that other people have probably run up against the same problems and might not have the capacity or the time or the energy to try to think of solutions that may not have the tools yet to kind of come up with those solutions so this is something you know like I think in Nicole's case. We were talking about that earlier you know bringing design thinking to a team or UX design to a team that had never thought about it before or didn't know how to implement it before so yeah kind of in the same thread of like if you have a question other people have a question in the same room so just don't be afraid to to jump in there. So thank you very much everybody for your thoughts on this. I'm going to move on to another question we have some questions in the Q&A we will get to those in a little bit but just to keep going with some of the general questions we had prepared. So a portfolio is something that a lot of students really focus a lot of time and energy in creating and completing before they finish the program or at the end of the program. And it really should be considered a work in progress. So how often did you update your portfolios or change your portfolios while you were searching for a job. So I think one of the decisions I decided to make after I had first finished Emily Carr was to completely redo my portfolio because I learned so much while I was there but I was rushing so much to get kind of deadlines made and I wanted to really make sure that my portfolio was showcasing the best of my abilities so I took what I had learned from that process of making a website that I wasn't completely happy with and completely redid it and I was lucky to kind of have the time and and and what not to do that but it really really helped kind of push things forward. I've got to say that it was not ready when I first got my first job so it's something that needs to kind of be, for my opinion, worked on continuously. If you if you let it fall off which I've definitely done in the past, it kind of leads to leads to having to rush when you get to that point of wanting to look for a job again. And then it's a lot of working and it can be a little bit overwhelming and intimidating if you feel like you've got 10 projects that you want to add to your portfolio or whatever it happens to be. So I'd say the more you can kind of continuously check back in take a look at at how your websites performing and how how your overall structure is of the portfolio and how it aligns with what your project is doing and you know maybe maybe checking in with your current goals is what they were a year ago, because that for me has kind of changed continuously as well as would probably be the advice that I'd give myself, I was looking back to. Jared, are you going to go there. I hesitate to speak towards this because I have a very neglected portfolio. See some other people nodding. Yeah, same thing it was super rushed by the end of the program and I was lucky enough to find a position quite quickly. But my biggest advice around a portfolio is really don't fixate on it and don't think it's what's going to get you the job. It might get you the interview might get you the initial meeting but it's better to, as Nicholas saying just keep working at it and keep applying while you're working at it before you perfect it because I can tell you now I don't have an online portfolio but I do have this big mobile that I send people that I update specifically to wherever I'm applying to and that works right to. So it's, yeah, adaptability is probably better than perfectionism for that. Actually, I feel the same as Mackenzie's like please do not ask this question because I haven't done anything with my portfolio since I finished school and I still not proud about it. But a big one for me there is like we finish a school again I made a grade they are good I send it to people. At that point I didn't have that much experience to show off. And, and I feel because I was rushing is still not showing my whole skills so I took a different road I feel like what are my strengths is my portfolio and wrestling my strings they're not. Honestly, I took more of my time of networking different ways, connecting with people, genuinely, and I think all the interviews that I got, honestly, we're because of networking so I was using my strength that is connected with people, and realizing that that's what you are going to get you're not going to get the whole Juliet in my portfolio but you get the whole Juliet talking to me. I knew that was my strength so that's what I use, and it's same as Mackenzie if I knew that I was applying for X job that I was looking for access skills I will try to bring that out of my cases studies and bring it into a special portfolio for the interview that or for the job that I was applying so I was trying to be again be unique and special for that job application. Yeah, in terms of portfolios. Yeah, Sam, no, nothing nothing that's it's all trash. But yeah, no, it's never finished creative people have this innate sickness that nothing is ever finished. There's always room for improvement editing a complete overhaul, you put the finishing touch on something and two weeks later you come back and say this is horrible I want to redo it. But you know, you can't overthink it. And sometimes it's good to just take a step back, a lot of breathe. You know from my perspective simplicity is key in a portfolio like really define your problem statements were just solutions and a clear and understandable manner. Give brief summaries of features and list out really good success metrics. If you don't have, you know, if it hasn't actually been like a built product. You can use maybe test data from prototypes or, you know, even at a minimum some ways to you expect to measure success out of your projects. But I think a lot of things that I initially thought that needed to be in a portfolio. Research like, like 13 paragraphs of my entire process and reaches. It's somewhat superfluous it's not necessary it's good to have that available when people ask. But you know design leads are busy, they're going to be reading through dozens and dozens of portfolios when they think about hiring so it's unlikely that they're going to be skipping through all 10, all 10 paragraphs so again simplicity is key but always have that on hand. And even if you have it and maybe like a separate page or file. That's always handy as well. Totally, I think to your point I think one of the most successful things I've seen when looking at other designers work and and hiring etc having a really succinct kind of summary and something that's really quickly viewable just makes it that much easier when you're going through a lot of applications as well. Thank you so much everybody, something I actually want to come back to that most of you mentioned and is likely the case for a lot of folks who are joining either a boot camp, or a short term program or, you know wanting to change their careers is that we all have a life that happened before we made that decision to go back to school and change direction so you know in Mackenzie's case there's a whole degree in psychology. There's a lot of the background in tech and computer science and Jared there's the entrepreneurship and industrial design and you know we've got like Julia as well like the retail experience and working with people and connecting with people. What would you say is like a way that you used that experience to leverage yourself. You know if we if we exclude the portfolio and you know trying to refine this to be a perfect sort of artifact of what we just learned. How did you use that previous experience to kind of help bolster yourself when you went into those interviews or tried to highlight your skills to a hiring panel or one individual person. I'm going to stop rambling there and just leave out hanging for somebody to pick up. I can go back a little bit about the values that I listed at the beginning. Definitely, they have mold to something different as today because at that point I think I was driven about having a new career and meeting and networking and meeting people. But I think at the moment in the moment that I realized that my experience because you finish whatever school and you're ready to find a job and no one is like we don't like you. You are not enough and you feel sad and depressed and I mean it happens to absolutely everybody is looking the point is you realize what is my values. What do I what is my unique strength that's that's how kind of call it and I think when I start changing that mindset into I'm enough and I started bringing everything that I've been working so hard about it. So for me for the job that I have right now being an immigrant is such a plus for what I do. I've been being in the immigration process for, I don't know I did it for seven years and the project that I'm working right now is so close to my heart is like, is amazing. I'm always so excited about what I'm doing. But again, finding a job that is making my strings like explode and people is like yeah we want you. I think that was for me a big step in finding and telling people what I want. I want this type of job. This is what I'm looking for. Of course this is stressful when you're looking for a job and you're new to say what you want. But at the same point I was going away from retail because there were a lot of things that I didn't like. So for me it didn't make sense to jumping the same thing because it's a new career. Definitely I have the privilege to have six months a little more of being able to not to work on definitely network and concentrating my career. And that's a big plus definitely that I had. But for me it's like how do I start putting my strengths my passions together and telling people what I like I told absolutely everybody about what Juliet was looking Juliet is looking for UX design my mom my grandpa, like everybody know what is UX design because I wanted everybody to know and like that's definitely how I call people calling me and finding job is like hey we have Juliet she's pretty beautiful, why don't you hire her. So I mean, you use what you have, and I think just go for it. Yes. Yeah, totally. I feel on a similar vein, networking was drilled into me from an early age. So, you know, it was easy to sell my, my undergrad degree in psychology. As far as understanding research and having that motivation to understand users and translate that to design, but really, really corny reason why I got my first job is because somebody I worked with in house painting who referred me basically said I was a hard worker. So, this is like the dad moment of the evening. Any job you're doing show up. You're just going to show up and try to do your best. And this also ties into networking you do not know who you talk to who will lead to your next job so just as Juliet said, put it out there. Yeah, I feel so similar to I think probably one of the best decisions I made, looking back was asking different people within the company to be mentors for me. So, so even once I got to a point where it's at a company I hadn't necessarily done a lot of networking at the point in time because I was kind of thrown into an internship which was an assignment of my school. But kind of going that route of getting a lot of different perspectives and mentorship within the company can really help you refine what you want your own plans to be for the future to and also kind of looking at different perspectives but if you take that outside of before you're actually in the company I think that that networking is so important and and kind of making those links is everything that the community in Vancouver is we're lucky to have a large tech community but it's smaller than you think everyone tends to kind of know each other. So it really really helps to kind of make those connections. Yeah, I can say that working in the service industry, you know waiting on tables you're having, you know, 60 different conversations a night with completely different people strangers that you know you have to find common ground. So other than what are you having for dinner like, you know you get a schmooze in a bed and asking what they're doing and so that definitely played a huge part in my career and going into interviews and finding common ground and just, you know, they don't want to hire people that they want to work with. It's as simple as that you can be the best worker but if you're, you're kind of an adult or something. You know you might have a tough time getting over the line. So just, I mean, it's personality doesn't always come as first nature, it definitely took me a while to learn when I was in high school as sheepish and that kid who stood in the corner. And even now, networking is, is tough. I still don't find it comfortable if it's hard kind of reaching out and to what Nicole was saying about the community in Vancouver. People here are great. They want to nurture talent. And so don't hesitate to reach out. And same I think at Nicole might have mentioned this before. You know, after the session you're more than welcome to contact me on LinkedIn I'll be happy to, you know, critique your portfolio even just answer any more questions you have after this. I think most people in the industry are as well so feel confident and don't be shy to just reach out because most people are going to want to help you. It's actually just speaking of like the small community, you know, that everybody kind of knows everybody else in this community in Vancouver. I think there's been at least one person, if not more per panel who's worked at some point at SAP. So that's just been sort of like an unintentional theme of this series of panels like oh yeah I started with an internship at SAP and I was like check. Okay. So definitely that that interconnectivity and reaching out into the community and asking for what it is that you need and for those connections to come back to you. That's been from my perspective also reaching out into an industry that I'm not actually a part of, and making, you know, literally hundreds of connections with people I mean that's how I connected with Juliet. I mean I know all three of the other folks on this panel because I met you through this program. And, but you know like those, you never know where those go, where those connections go and where they might end up and how they can come back to you and what you can also offer back in return so. Yeah nurturing a community is is a really important part of this. Great. Okay, next question. I'm just mindful of the time here. And I wanted to, I wanted to ask Juliet actually a question directly. So your UX untamed podcast centers on the experience of starting on a new career path. What have been some of the greatest lessons when speaking with guests, and how has that helped you on your path. Yeah, I think we started the podcast because we were against that no one is calling you and no one wants to hire me. I mean, I like we wanted to make sure that our audience is like the people who is hiring and these companies saying hey Juliet really care about this these look what she's doing I think that was our first intention. At the same time we wanted to know what the people who is on UX already have a longer experience and what are the living and what do you expect in a job in different environments in different industry sizes. And as I think it was that it was just less connect to people less show older people who is studying what it feels like, what can you learn and for me was a great starting point with people is like hey yeah have a podcast about UX when you like to talk in our podcast. I'd be having the chance to talk to so many people. I'm the one who who go once and want to see the person will be. Thank you so much for us to bring it into the podcast. So I feel like for me it's been a great experience just to again networking and learn from people and saying to people I do love what I'm doing I'm passionate about and I'm ready for the change and and I think it works. Yeah. Thanks so much Juliet. Everybody should should follow Juliet's podcast untamed or UX untamed. And you'll get lots more information and hear a lot more about what Juliet has been up to and who she's been talking to so definitely give that a follow. There's another little plug for you. Hi, Juliet. So, a question for Mac. You joined turtle design as an intern after graduating, and you stayed with them for two years as you mentioned. What were some of the benefits for you when you stayed and grew with the team. Yeah, great question. So, getting hired on as an intern. It was great because again like I was saying previously, I got to work with three really senior designers and I was one of their first employees. It was cool to grow with them and watch them hire other designers and be able to work with them as one of their like first people in defining how they want the team to look and grow and what we should expect as their employees. It helped me learn how to advocate myself for myself as an employee so this isn't even talking about design but that was a benefit of staying growing with the team and then just getting to work. More speaks to how small it was but just getting to work on so many different things and try out more visually focused design projects more UX design projects and then being able to present to clients directly on like which is rare as a junior, I would say. Yeah, as far as other comment that I think that's kind of it. I can't speak more highly about turtle they were great mentors and they really had my back as a baby designer coming in and trying to work me up towards more intermediate levels. Nice. Thank you so much. I'm going to actually switch over to some of the questions in the Q&A. So we have one question that is about roots for like paths that a person can take who's actually working a full time job so as we know the full time certificates or the boot camps are full time intensive so it's very challenging if not impossible to have both a full time job and go to full go to school full time. So what would be from your perspectives now a good opportunity for somebody who needs to continue working but also wants to join a UX program or do UX studies. That's a good one. And I feel like this is, I don't know. I mean, I'm older. I know. And again, I'm doing my YouTube channel about changing careers in your late studies so you can imagine how I am. And I just didn't want to go for another two careers I did that already on when I was younger. So for me it was at the point maybe this is not what you are looking for for me was at the point is like, I want to find if I like this. How I can know that I like this. And I will say there's so many organizations, for example for me I will mention at work BC that helped me to pay my school and gave me allowance what I was working so I feel like is like what else are you looking outside of what is like I don't know asking for a bank for money or whatever it is like where else can you find this money for you to go to school and have the opportunity to be full time and maybe have a part time little something on the side does what I was doing nothing crazy but something that will allow me to eat but while I'm at school so I will say try to go creative. If not is like who can you start talking with that tell you about UX design and can turn mentorship and then you get a little more familiar and see if you like it or not. Do some information interviews. We, is this really what you're going to like how is to work in a day to day so that will be my recommendation. I can't say I've ever been in that situation myself, but I think if you're already in a position where you kind of set on UX and UX design, and you know that that's a route you want to go in I'd say kind of pinpointing. I wrote that works best for your schedule like you know yourself best. If you're able to kind of do self guided learning and there's a course that provides that it can be flexible outside of work, then maybe do your best to kind of look up those, those options or talk to people about who might have done something similar as well. I think there's lots of and I don't know for say but I know I'm fairly certain a lot of the boot camps to do kind of evening school. And if not, I know Google has a self kind of directed learning course that a friend of mine has taken. So there are opportunities out there. And again, it's kind of up to you. If you feel like you can make it work with the full time job then I strongly suggest you go for that. And if you want to focus all of your effort and time on doing UX then by all means that's that's another route as well. So doing a self directed learning course like the one from Google might be a good kind of introduction. After doing that you might realize hey this isn't for me, or maybe this is all that I ever want to do for the rest of my life, and that might make you might help with a different decision maybe need to take out a loan or something. But, you know, I really recommend just learning for yourself and figuring it all out. Great. Thank you. We'll go on to another question that we have here. Other than attending class and doing portfolio projects. How can someone prepare to be more competitive in the job search. I love this question. Because it's something that I think a lot of people is traveled with and I mean again we're coming out of a school without any experience and maybe we did a couple of hackathons here and there but honestly I never tell people that I did a hackathon because they didn't have this experience or proving my work when I was doing hackathons so at least for me didn't work. But again I think I'm going back to cherry on tech. There is a lot of people that is in the same shoes that as that are finishing school developers project managers, all the designers, they're hungry for real experience like that interaction and building something. So again, we talk about community how we can reach the community and let hey this is what I'm building. We build products that empower women and non-binary people. That's what I'm so excited about. So I found people that are excited about this. This is amazing because you're not just building experience for real experience with developers and again product managers, but you are building something that you are so proud and excited to research and excited to tell people. So for me it's like what are your passions land and how you can unite that with what you just learned right now. So that's my fine community, fine other people. Yeah, I think that's, oh sorry. I think that's really great advice. I would follow it myself as well and I think being in the perspective of someone who's fresh out of school and doesn't have a lot of experience kind of really owning what your strengths are. So even though you don't have experience, you have experience in your projects and you can kind of hopefully tell where those strengths lie when you're working within teams and when you're working on your individual projects as well. So kind of really pay close attention to that and take a lot of ownership about the skills that you know you are really good at and be proud of those because I think especially being fresh out of school. I know for myself that maybe being a woman probably ties into it a bit but imposter syndrome is a real thing and people can kind of tell when you're not feeling confident and they kind of play off of that energy too. So I think the more you can be kind of confident of those skills that you've you've really honed in and learned throughout the program. The more other people will believe it as well. I think I don't have too much more to add that those two didn't already say but yeah just you can even start networking now just to really drill that in is just get out there now and start talking to people whether it's on LinkedIn or through industry nights or anything like that. I don't feel like you need to always be focusing on UX, maybe try like looking through Craigslist and seeing what sort of little side gigs doing a logo or doing, you know, little bits and bobs here and there. I know there's a huge thing in the community about not working for free. I think there's there's two sides to that coin I don't think anyone should ever expect you to work for free. But if you're offering your services to a friend or to a family member say your friend opens a business and they need a website. I don't think it's unheard of to to offer your services. If you're brand new out of school. Getting that kind of valuable experience, working with actual client client. Is that again like, if anyone pressures you to say hey, you're going to get great exposure from this like, tell them to you know screw off and pay you what you're worth. Sorry, can I add something to just drag said so I think for me one was one of the best things that that I could do. One of my friends back in coming Columbia put up a restaurant. And of course, COVID was coming in and they decided that website and I was checking it out is like, kind of give you some suggestions. So I think for me, it was again how I can use the skills that I just learned how can empower my friend with the new business that is going through all of these news things happening as a consultant. And that leads to they ended up doing some changes to the website and it has worked so fast so well so good. And a lot of people I do photography on the side. So he's some of my friends is like oh can I get some portraits and say sure what are you use them and for and then they say open my website. I cool who is building your website. So that ended up being me, but I mean I just honestly I don't know if I'm just like jumping to everything but I just put myself out and I make sure that how can I use my skills to empower people that I do really care. These websites that I built, they are paying for. So at the end of the day I'm making some money learning having real stakeholder experience clients, changing their mind and wanted something more bigger and better. So anyway, always look for the people who love you that they're going to want to help you at the end of the day to amazing advice. Thank you so much. I have a question from the Q&A. So somebody is asking, what did you like most about the Emily car program and or the boot camp program so while you're in school what was what was something that you really enjoyed about that experience. I did, like, it was exciting to finally discover something that felt like a fit and the UX program Emily car is a good job of exposing you to different aspects of what makes I call product designer as like an all encamping term but that includes UX UI research. So it exposes it does a good job of exposing you to all those different things and they're some of them feel a little bit like nuggets but it's still not to understand what you're interested in. Yeah. Yeah, I would probably echo that a little bit. I think just the exposure to so many different pieces whether it's learning how to build a website learning how to design it properly for the best user experience learning the user centered processes and and how you can kind of workshop and collaborate on that together I think kind of bringing all those little pieces together into one is what really made it work for myself. And on that note that yeah that was something I used fresh out of school to is, I didn't have a job right away it took me a few months to get one and I was able to make some income just using that skill that I learned at Emily car to make websites for others to I don't have much to add. Yeah, I can confidently say that I've never enjoyed school up until on the car. I was never good at it as always kind of a goofball sitting in the back of the class just doodling on the desks. And so it was it was quite it just felt nice to, you know, enjoy a course take a course where I felt like I was learning I felt like I wanted to learn. And that, you know, the teachers were there to teach something that they wanted to teach not just like the sad English teacher who's just, you know, there because it's a paycheck. And yeah, I thought that it was also just nice being in a small group of like minded individuals rather than, you know, 35 person classroom. So I quite enjoyed I guess just the feeling of wanting to learn. I don't know much about you guys. But I didn't get my case when you were talking about that you didn't like the code inside is like, Oh, you know, I will have love for me to know a little more of that right now because definitely that's something that I struggle the most is like, not trying to guess what the developers really want are talking about but really understand. For me, the boot camp is intense. I feel like I knew that I was getting into that I was starting from five to nine for three months not stopping even weekends. So again, I knew that I wanted something intense and something that let me know if I really like this. So for me that was mostly the option that I took the boot camp for to quickly add on that it's fine that you brought that up because I was going to say, as much as coding was difficult for me, it was absolutely essential and I'd like that was one of the program or that was one of the reasons that my car program stood out to me was because it offered that I knew it would be hard, but it, it, especially with working with other designers who didn't necessarily get that exposure. There is that it's it's proven valuable for sure. And I just also loved how to speak to what Jared said I just loved how practical school finally was and how I could see such a tangible results and not just like English fast writing an essay that's based. I don't know, not an opinion, but anyway, essays, no essays over here. It's amazing. Well, I have to say, you know, definitely feel a little bit of relief to hear that you actually enjoyed the program from your perspective, you know, I was a little bit like, do I ask this question out loud, what happens if they're all like this was the worst experience of my life. Thank you so much for sharing that and, you know, also, you know, definitely understanding the perspective of the challenge of committing to that intensity. I mean just going to school period is intense, making that choice to go back to school is intense. And then on top of that you have this, you know, quite literally like nine to nine or maybe like even more than that you're you're getting all this time dedicated to it but you know I wanted to bring this panel together to show that it does, and it can pay off. And that it, that it has a really exciting possibility for for people so thank you for sharing that. Now I can, now I can breathe. Okay. We have time for one more question. And I'm going to throw this one out there. It's asking about salaries for entry level position so this is a nice practical way to end our conversation today I think. So the question is, what is a reasonable salary as an entry level UX designer, and what city in Canada, do you think has the best UX job vacancy. I really want to hear these from all of you. I'm not going to. I'm afraid what are you going to say so I'm listening. That's such a hard question to answer because it's it depends on startup agency, big company, big corporation. I just speak to my experience. I think I started around 55,000 for at a very small agency. You have to consider living wage as well, I would say don't go like if possible don't go below 50,000. But that's, it's hard to say. And this was three and a half years ago so it might, maybe it's higher now. That would be great. There's something else I was going to say I completely forgot. Oh, as far as cities I have no idea. I've only ever stated Vancouver so I don't know. I'll jump in too. Yeah, I think I think it can be highly dependent on, you know, the size of the company you're working for whether you're doing an internship or getting more like a junior position. And what that happens to look like but I would say, kind of know the company do do your research when you're applying to glass doors really really helpful for kind of getting an understanding of some salaries that you can expect. That's probably where I would first go to look myself if I was curious to know more about what they offer. And I know for myself a starting salary was around 60,000. But unless you're doing an internship. Always, always ask for more know your worth once they decide that they want you they want you so so make sure that you kind of ask for more, even if it's just a little bit more. Whatever you're most comfortable with, but make sure you're kind of putting that out there too. Yeah, I started at 5050,000 as a UI designer. I think typically UI designers seem to be a slightly lower than say UX or product designer. But again, do your research. It's a wide, wide scale. And like, you know, everyone said so far it's, it's wildly different based on each company that you're going to apply for. Again, don't get bullied into thinking that it's the only offer you're ever going to receive. And someone's trying to undercut you real hard. So, like Nicole said, you asked for more pushback, they're expecting it. Red flag exactly Mackenzie. Yeah, they're expecting it for you to ask for more. And so don't, and don't think that it's it's just like fair because you're new to the industry, you deserve what you deserve. So again, I think like to echo Mackenzie, you don't need to go under 50k. That's probably a very minimum starting salary, depending on what you're doing. And then yeah, as terms of cities. Again, only been in Vancouver, I hear Toronto is quite bustling. So those are probably the two biggest tech centers in Canada you find. Okay, okay, I don't feel too bad. Now okay, I feel like I can say something. I see something that I have in consideration at least for myself when I was looking for a job again it was like retail life and work balance is horrible. Because I think I was sick for a long time and, and I think I didn't have chance to do a stuff that I really like. So when I was looking for definitely for my new job, I was putting a lot of things that I am passionate about. So for me that was one of the things that I was looking for that this first job offered me that I could use everything that Juliet is not just a limited part of UX, but everything. So is there definitely I talked to different people in the public sector. For me I didn't know that the public sector those UX but they do, and he's in a lot of UX designer and different options so I think for me I look at that too and compare what we're doing at we are called journey labs for IRCC. So I think that there's no much wriggling room in the public sector for how much to us I think is the brackets are really sad. So for as we're starting between like 61 to 65 depending as an entry level. I don't feel too bad. And I think the work life balance that I have is dreamy. I have never had this much flexibility. People that really care about me so I was looking for something else that I will pile up in that money that I don't have that is like what is the company of the organization giving me in a back that I can really work with. Thank you everybody for sharing your salaries. Personal information. Thank you so much for your transparency. Thank you so much for everything you shared this evening with our audience. And thank you especially for your time and energy in giving back to this community. It's all the time we have this evening and thank you so much. It's much appreciated and I hope everybody has a lovely evening. And I hope we see each other again very soon. So take care everyone. Have a good night. Good to meet everyone. Thanks everyone. Bye.