 Hi everyone. In this video, I am going to teach you how to get your first job as a UX designer. I'm Dee. I'm a product designer here at AJ & Smart, and I've worked in product and UX design for over 10 years. In this video, we're going to talk about how to get your first job as a UX designer, whether you're changing careers from another field, or you've just studied UX design and are trying to land that first role. As you're watching this video, if any thoughts or questions come up about UX design or getting your first job, just pop them below in the comments. We're going to talk about how to build your network, how to get that first job when you don't have any practical experience yet, what hiring managers are really looking for, and I'm going to give you three secret tips that you won't see anywhere else. Let's dive into the first topic, how to build your network. The most important thing to know is that building your network means you actually need to go and meet some real people. There's tons of ways you can do this. The first one is looking for meetups near you. There's a great website called meetup.com, where you can type in something like UX design and find tons and tons of local events all about UX design with other experienced professionals there speaking and attending that you can go and meet. There's also things like conferences where you can volunteer your time to help with the conference, but that way you often get a free ticket to the conference. So you're building your knowledge by actually attending lots of talks and also then mingling and meeting lots of other really senior professionals in your area, but also people who have traveled from other places in other cities. So that way you really can get to meet a lot of super interesting and highly skilled people. And then there's also online. There's a ton of great communities like UX Mastery is one where there's actually community forums where lots of people discuss and ask each other questions about things like getting your first job in UX design and you can participate in those forums and also build networks and meet people there and ask questions about UX design too. UX design is a really people focused field. So if you feel a bit uncomfortable about going and approaching people and mingling and networking, you'll really need to work on this if you're going to be comfortable with a job in UX design. So use this opportunity now to practice those skills of forcing yourself to approach people, having topics of conversation and things that you can actually offer those people and start conversations because you're going to be needing to do that throughout the rest of your career. Really engage people and get people motivated to do things. So start really honing those skills now while you're building your network. Something that you might not be thinking of at this point at the beginning of your UX career is that you can actually volunteer to give a talk or run a workshop that you want to practice and this can help you get over that hump of being really nervous about presenting or nervous about actually practicing your field, your new field. So you can actually contact people that are running meetups or events and offer to give a talk about something that you do know. Maybe it's something you've studied in a program or something that you're bringing from another field and offer to give a talk on a specific subject. If you don't have to be the world's expert in the room, you just have to have one topic that might be interesting for other people. This is a great way for you to actually get practice and also get your face out there and get yourself seen, especially if you can record the talk for example and have something to put in a portfolio. So that's my first piece of advice to really build a strong network by going to meetups and free events, volunteering at conferences and building that network of really senior experienced people and volunteering to give talks even if you're nervous to get that practice and get your face out there as someone who knows stuff. The next topic we're going to talk about is what hiring managers and employers are actually looking for from a junior or entry level UX designer. The big thing that everyone underestimates is how hard it is to actually find good people and this is not just about the skills that you've learned because if you've done a UX course or you've started to get some experience those skills as you know are all learnable. You can learn the fundamental steps and processes to be a UX designer. What's really hard for hiring managers to find are people who are great at communicating, great at activating other people to collaborate and get work done and really good at having a thought process behind their work. Those are things that are much harder to learn and that's where you can really set yourself apart. Here comes secret tip number one. If you're already working in a job and trying to change into UX take what you can from the job that you're currently in. Whether you're working in a restaurant, in customer service or in a completely different office job. Try and use what's around you whether it's other teams or situations where you can practice the things that you've learned how to be a UX designer in the situation that you're in. This will give you really practical experience of what it feels like to solve complex problems through the mindset of a UX designer. For example, if you're working in a restaurant or a cafe or a bar maybe there's some process something that's going on there where there's something difficult whether customers have to wait a long time at certain parts of the day or something about the way the tables or the restaurant is laid out is making it difficult for food to get delivered. Anything that you can find that's a problem that you know could be solved but you don't quite know how, you can apply a UX process to that by analyzing what's going on, interviewing the people working there doing some research, making some tests and prototypes and then crafting a solution and actually testing to see if it works. You can apply any UX process to any situation then you'll have a really tangible practical experience that you can draw from and even showcase in a portfolio. Another really common question from new UX designers is how do I get that first job when I don't have any real paid work experience to show? This is a really big question and it's got to actually really easy answer. While you're in the position of looking for your first role you can do a small personal project. If you know someone in your friendship or family network that has a small business you could do some work for free. Make sure you set some boundaries so you're not working for months for free but offer to do a little bit of work for them. Maybe they need a new website for example. You could offer to do that design for them. You can interview them, do some sketches, make some mock-ups, prototype some ideas, test them with real people to get feedback and then actually make a real design and then you've got a real showcase of something that you can also put in your portfolio. Now that we've mentioned the word portfolio let's talk about that. In most cases you will need to have one but the most important thing to remember here is that it doesn't need to be as huge an effort as you think. I hear a lot of people spending months working on a really flashy slick online portfolio website. The most important thing to have in your portfolio is your thought process, the way you think, the way you work, how you solve problems. Tell a story about who you are as a designer. I've got some great examples to show you here and also how you can actually get inspiration from other portfolios. The best place to look is not by just googling and searching but actually go to somewhere like Twitter and then search for great UX portfolios. Twitter is a great platform for designers to communicate and that's where all the great design stuff is. If you search in Google you might come up with a lot of junk but Twitter is the place to find real stuff. Here are some examples that I found earlier. There's three portfolios I want to show you really quickly and this is all from searching through Twitter. This one is really clear and easy to read. You can see instantly the work that she's done and while she's actually designed some apps here and she's got some nice moving images of what she's done, the really key part of this is that she's got a very clear simple story of what the challenge was, what the goals were and what the process was that she went through to actually solve those challenges. You can see she's got just sketches that she's done and she's put those up on the site to show how she went from sketched ideas to actual concepts. You don't have to have worked on really big cases before but just show the actual thought process that you went through. The second portfolio here is a super simple site and of course you don't have to build a site from scratch yourself. There's tons of website builders. The thing I want to show you with this one is just how simple it actually is. You can tell it's probably using some kind of template. There's big blocks showing the things they've worked on. For you they might be not these big brand names like this but even if you just have three of those sample projects that you've worked on, they can go very simply on a webpage like this and then when you click into one, it's a clear story of the process that person went through to design this outcome. So there's of course screenshots of sketches and the process they went through but they're clearly talking about their role, what they did and the thought process they went through and actually photos of the steps as they went through them as well. The last one here is also very simple with a picture of the actual person talking about who they are and what they care about and then education and experience. They have their primary skills which is the things that if I was a hiring manager looking at this portfolio, I would be able to look at this and say those are the values and skills that I care about too and this organisation cares about and I can see clearly here they've just outlined the three most important things for them. So this is how simple your online portfolio can be. The key point is don't over complicate it and try and make it super flashy. Make it really clear so a hiring manager can see who you are, how you work and what your processes and methods are. So secret tip number two is make sure that you have three simple things that you offer as a designer that you can put in your portfolio. I'm not talking about stuff that you've done but a simple workshop that you run for problem solving a clear simple process that's the one that you follow in your UX design methods and maybe one other artifact or tool that you believe in and that you can do. So then your portfolio won't be full of just a list of things that you've done but really clear outline of three ways that you work and ways that you think. Okay, so that was all about how to show your skills when you haven't done any paid work yet. The first one is do a personal project especially favours for friends and family so you can show something. Then you need to actually make a portfolio but don't overthink it, keep it simple and about who you are and how you work and then find three core things they could be tools, methods or approaches that you can showcase in that portfolio to really show how you work. Now comes to the challenge of actually finding and applying for jobs. Most jobs aren't actually advertised online and you can find yourself spending hours and days trawling through job sites, applying for everything and then waiting to see what happens. You can do this but you should also be actually hunting down and thinking about the companies that you really want to work for. If you don't know yet what the great companies are and what might be really good fits for you talk to other people on those online communities and forums at those meetups at those conferences and specifically ask especially senior professionals what companies they admire the most and what were the best companies that they've ever worked for. So you can start to make a short list go home, research those companies look them up, look at their careers page look at their culture if they talk about company culture and see if you really would want to work there and then you can actually directly contact those companies and show them that great portfolio that you've made that shows who you really are and tell them about how you work and why you think you'd be a great fit. This can be really intimidating to write an email or a message to a company when it's cold, a cold email where they haven't ever talked to you before but there's great ways, simple ways that you can do this well. If you look online you can simply search how to write a great cold email to get a job I've got an example here on the screen and you'll find tons and tons and tons of examples I've got one up here just to show you an example so this is a blog post or an article that just outlines the fundamental steps the really clear steps of what you should do starting with researching in that company who the best person would be you don't just want to email HR you want to find the person that's actually maybe going to be hiring in the team that you would want to work in so research and find that person that you want to contact take time to come up with a really good subject line, there's all this information in here you can read yourself and then it gives you really the instructions of how to construct and write an email that's going to be meaningful and interesting for the person that's going to do the hiring so really researching this and then spending more time on fewer applications that are going to be a really great fit for you and what you're going to enjoy and want to work there is going to make a huge difference for your career and you'll actually love the first job that you're in are you ready for a secret tip number 3 this tip is all about speaking the right language you may have studied UX design you may have really already researched a lot about the field but what you'll also need to have is business lingo and product and marketing language so that maybe the manager that you're talking to or the teen that you'll be working in or with you can actually really communicate well with them if the marketing person is talking about metrics and sales numbers then you want to be able to not only understand what they're talking about but also be able to speak the same language back and so they can tell that you understand their business you understand how things work that way you'll appear as a much better communicator so to summarize while you could spend a lot of time looking at job lists and applying for everything you see it's better if you find the companies that you actually want to work with and think could fit well with and reach out to them directly with a great cold email and lastly find out and familiarize yourself with that business language and you can use the jobs around you and the people around you to start to do that if you just have your awareness out it'll start to happen organically so hopefully that's taken some of the anxiety out of this job in UX design if you had any thoughts or questions we're happy to answer them just pop them in the comments below if you want to see more videos like this we have weekly videos on YouTube and you can subscribe to our channel we have daily vlogs on Instagram please subscribe at A.J. Smart Design and we have a fortnightly newsletter that you can sign up for there's a link in the bio below and if you're interested in product design and tech news we have a great podcast that you can find on all the podcast services called the Product Breakfast Club thank you for watching, I hope you enjoyed this video and see you again soon so that's my first piece of advice to really try and build your network by so that's my the big thing that a lot of new UX designers don't think about is that this is the first secret secret quick, keep shooting oh my god