 Do you want to work as a UX designer at a cool and innovative company like Nike? Well, in this video, we're going to show you how to do just that. In this video, we're going to take a look at an actual job posting by Nike on LinkedIn. Our colleague Amer will walk you through the sections in this job description and explain to you how you should think about them and how you should prepare for an interview at a company like Nike. As you watch the video, if you have any questions about how to apply to jobs at companies like Nike or any of the Silicon Valley giants, leave them in the comments below. Oh, and also we have a weekly newsletter. And if you want to be in the know on all things UX, UI, product design, and latest techniques, you've got to subscribe to it. The link is in the description below. Now let's dive in. So in this video, I'm going to look at a job posting from Nike and just go over it and give you guys my thoughts in case you wanted to apply for something like this. So what we're looking at here is a UX designer role, right? So first off, this doesn't say junior. And right off the bat, you can expect that they will ask for some sort of experience here. It says four or five years. And before I go through the rest of the posting, this is something I want to talk about. So you'll often see companies asking for so many years of experience, you can, for the most part, ignore that because they just put that here to filter people out, people who are not confident enough to apply. But what actually happens is that if they like you, if they like your work, if they feel confident that you can do the job, then even if you have a couple years of experience, that'll be fine. So I just wanted to get that out there first. Now if we take a look at this, the term UX designer works really differently across companies. And so you'll find here in this particular posting that it says create the next generation analytics driven planning applications. So human centered design, that's to be expected. They need you to know what human centered design is. And you'll be creating accessible, intuitive, easy to use products. That's all fine. Fast dynamic product managers. This is all fine. They say you'll be working with software engineers and data scientists. Now this is not true of every company. So this is something that's specific to this rule. And it's good to keep in mind that you'll have differences across companies for what people expect from a UX designer, because they want you to fit in a particular context. And don't just build the expectation is like, oh, being a UX designer now means that I have to work with data scientists, right? That's not an expectation that you should have of every job. It just depends on the company. And once you've looked at a few job postings, you'll start to see the patterns like, okay, this is the core set of skills that everyone requires. And these are things that are more specific to this job. And here's this is a useful section to be successful. You need to be a UX expert so far so good evangelize human centered design. This is all part of the basics of being a UX designer. And you'll need to help the team understand the phases of human centered design. So this is already telling you that communication is going to be important in this role. And this will play a part in your job interview. If someone is hiring for a position where you need to be a good communicator, then obviously, if you don't know how to communicate your thoughts, your ideas, your previous experience in that interview, then your chances will suffer of getting that job, right? So if I were you, I would practice everything that I want to say until I have it memorized by heart, because you'll probably feel little pressure during the interview, especially if you haven't done a lot of job interviews that can be quite stressful, even if the people that you're with are super nice, just because you'll be putting pressure on yourself, you want to get this job, or you're talking to this company that you love, like in this case, for example, if you love Nike, so you will have stress. So if you memorize everything that you're going to say, so that when there is that added pressure, you won't completely like have a brain freeze or something, and you'll still be able to sound just like a normal casual person. You'll lose some of your confidence, obviously, you know, from the practice, you'll be like very confident when you're practicing alone. But in the interview itself, you'll be probably a little more nervous. So as much as you can practice before the interview, especially if you're new to applying to ex jobs, that'll be better, right? So let's see, care more about your users needs than your design aesthetic. So you can see here, they already mentioned data at the top. And this tells you that they really care about data driven design. And it's not about what you think will work better. It's more about focus on the users and the way you prove that this is what the users want is probably going to be through some sort of qualitative or quantitative analysis, meaning either you interview a few people and talk to them, or you have some sort of a B test going on, and you're just gathering a lot of information that way. Next, let your natural curiosity drive you complex business requirements. So they also expect you to be interested in the business side. So you're not just going to be there as a pixel pusher, as they say, or someone who just worries about the visual design, you also need to understand, how does the product help the business? Because at the end of the day, that's what the product is there for. It's not a charity. You need to find the intersection of the best products that will serve customers really well in order to drive businesses, right? So in order to drive the business requirements that you have for this particular project. Next, it talks about need to move from empathy to ideation, iteration seamlessly and constantly. So this is where a process would be very useful. And if you practice talking about your process for how you'll be able to accomplish this, this will help you a lot. Obviously, by the way, I'm going through this just hitting off the points. And if you're someone who hasn't applied to a ton of UX jobs, your best chance at getting the job would be to really try to hit every point that they have. Someone more experienced won't necessarily be going, you know, according to a script, they'll be able to present themselves and more naturally talk about the parts that they want to talk about without having to worry too much about hitting off the checklist. But if you're a beginner at this, I strongly recommend that you really study the job requirements that they have to like that the company that you're applying to has and really make sure that you hit these when you're interviewing and prepare beforehand, right? So the next thing is lead creative sessions to gather ideas, focus the team, conversion toward testable solutions. So I don't know about you, but this sounds like you need to be able to run workshops and design sprints and know how to bring people together. So workshopping here, you might say we're a little biostat agent, smart, we love workshops, but we love them because they're so effective, right? Not the other way around. And so if you can show in the interview that you're someone who knows how to bring a group of people together because design product design is interdisciplinary by nature, you won't have all the information that you need to create the best design, you need to get input from the users, from business stakeholders, from every part of the company, right? And so you need a way to get that input in a way that's efficient, effective, in a way that doesn't bother the people that you're pulling from in a way that's not super slow as well, right? So being able to bring everyone together in a workshop is the best format for accomplishing something like this. And this is something that not a lot of people are good at. And especially a lot of designers just focus entirely on the design and don't focus a lot on the collaboration parts, which are part of every job. It's really rare that you'll go to a company and you'll be the only designer and you won't have to work with anyone else. That just doesn't exist anywhere, right? Hey, are you enjoying this video? Well, then you'll definitely like our weekly newsletter. Link is in description below. Subscribe to it to stay in the know on all of the things UX, UI, product design and tech news. Now let's dive right back in. The next thing is driving wireframing and prototyping. This is pretty standard test interactions, design and user flows to continually improve the efficiency of the system. This is what you would expect as part of every design rule. But the parts that you really need to focus on here, you can already see what the culture of Nike is that they're data driven and that they expect you to lead creative sessions. So they're looking for some facilitation and leadership and guidance skills, as well as the skill to work with data, or at least give the impression that you know how to work with data, right? So you say like, I validate all my designs by talking to users and I know how to ask questions in an unbiased way. I'm not just out there to test a prototype to get my users to say that they like it. Instead, I'm really getting unbiased results and I iterate on the product based on that, right? So already without going into the other sections of this job posting, you can already prepare with some really good points to increase your chances of getting this job. Now, if you look at here real quickly for the responsibilities, this looks more like standard UX stuff. So they do expect you to have UX research skills and not just UX design, right? Because as these roles become more and more complex, in some cases, you'll have companies only wanting a UX designer and they have another person who's doing UX research, but in companies with smaller teams, the UX designer will have to play different roles. So that will include the actual design, like as in like UI design, as well as doing UX research, which means you'll need to know how to talk to users, how to plan user interviews and ask the right questions. And here it says, perform quantitative and qualitative user research, as we talked about earlier, perform usability testing, clearly define the problem and articulate use cases, right? Here's that communication point again, you really need to be good at communication, you won't be this artist who just sits in a room and does whatever they want, you need to be able to communicate why you're making your design decisions and how they will help the business. And they also mentioned a role that you need to be a UX strategist in addition to UI and UX, right? So the UX strategist part is about knowing how to work with different people and bring different pieces together to fit in an overall strategy, right? And we covered this already. And now we come to the last section, which is what you bring to Nike. And this, if you're like a typical junior, you might fall in this mistake, you'll just scroll down, it's like, yeah, whatever. And he'll just focus on what to bring to Nike. And you'll get hung up on the four or five years of UX experience and focus like, oh, they want me to know, like Sketch and Envision and XD and Adobe, you know, CC and all the whole creative cloud thing and Figma. And he'll focus on going out and learning four or five tools when that's actually not important. And if you just know one of them, you can very confidently say it's like, oh, what do you guys use internally? And they'll say, we use Sketch. And you can say like, oh, well, I use Figma, but I know that they're pretty similar. And I can transfer most of my knowledge there. So that won't be a problem, right? So don't get hung up on the tools. Be confident going in with one tool as long as you know how these other tools look and work. So it would be that if like, maybe you have never heard of like Adobe and then like the people interviewing you will think like, does this person really know like our industry? Well, so as long as you know them, you can say like, yeah, I've taken a look at Figma and Sketch, but I actually specialized in one tool just to get really good at it, but I can transfer those skills. So don't don't get hung up on this. Now here because they are very data driven, they focus on experience with design research tools like Google Analytics, Relic, Hajar. Again, you don't need to master all of these. Just take a quick look at them, know what they do so that you can talk about them in the interview and just be honest and say, I know how to generate, you know, basic reports, the information that I need for my designs. I'm not an expert or a professional at using Relic and Hajar, but I know how to get what I need out of it in order to inform my design decisions. And that's all they're looking for. They don't need you to be, you know, the new Relic evangelist at the company or anything like that, right? And again, here you see the excellent communication skills. So they've really stressed this out throughout the whole job posting. And that's what makes it really key for you to practice what you're going to say before you go in there. Because like I said, you're going to feel under pressure and you're not going to talk at your usual level of confidence. You're going to forget some stuff. So it's really, really good to practice as much as you can beforehand. I mean, at the end of the day, if you're going to a Nike interview and you haven't practiced and you bomb at that interview, then you only have yourself to blame, right? If you want to work at a very cool company, at a cool job, you need to do the work required, right? And next, they also have like some pretty basic UX stuff. So knowing how to work with a team, experience and facilitation, they actually call out the word facilitation and design thinking workshops. I actually didn't know that these were here, but it was obvious from what they said in the previous sections. And empathy, curiosity, imagination, nice to have. So here they say like, it's nice to have experience with design thinking tools, mirror or mural. So this is, if you've been watching AJ and Smart Stuff, you know that we already use these tools a lot. And since everything is moving remotely, you need to know how to facilitate these workshops using digital whiteboard tools. And at the end, they also have some thing about like knowing a little bit of front end development, but they don't require that. So don't let that scare you away and some agile software development. So it's enough if you can demonstrate that you know how to work with developers, or you know like the basics of web design or front end design to understand it enough to be able to communicate well with the developer. And same thing with agile software development. So just to expect that for every job posting, you'll need to do some specific prep in order to increase your chances of getting that job. And that might mean just reading like an article or two about agile, or you know, the basics of front end development so that you can talk about them in the interview, right? So just block a couple hours, a few hours, depending on how much you want to get that job. And we definitely at AJ and Smart recommend quality over quantity. So instead of trying to apply to 50 companies and just spraying your CV all over the place, narrow down where you want to apply and then go really deep on these applications and just prepare really well for them. And that will increase your chances of getting that job significantly. And that's it from us. I hope you've really enjoyed this video. Let us know in the comments below what your biggest takeaway is. And also, if you want us to analyze any other job openings that you want to apply to you, if you enjoyed watching this video, subscribe to this channel and hit the bell button for more videos like this on UX, UI and product design. Thanks for joining us. See you in the next one.