How To Prepare Yourself For Your First UX Job
By: Yasmine Zane
Tags: UX Design, Ux Strategy, User Experience Design, Ux Portfolio, User Experience

An overview of study material how you can prepare yourself into the world of UX.

Hey guys, in my previous article I mentioned that I will start my UX internship in October and this all without having any experience and portfolio. If you are wondering how this happened, feel free to read my other article! Anyway, I have 4 months to prepare myself for this new adventure and I would like to share the learning process with you. Hopefully my tips are helpful as you might be struggling how to start your career within UX.

Before you continue to read, in this article I will share the materials I studied the first month towards the internship. I will not explain how certain processes work within UX as you can study this by yourself.

First things first.. Find a course!

Unfortunately, I am not financial capable of following a bootcamp course, so I decided to focus on the course of Google. The monthly cost is 32 EUR, and you can stop the subscription any time.

The course consists of a series of seven courses and each course lasts four weeks. Basically, you work under 10 hours per week on the course and you can finish it within less than 6 months. I believe that you cannot go wrong with Google so that’s why I used this course also a guideline to dive deeper into the topics.

This course is so perfectly structured. I used it as a guideline and looked for additional information in other to get more in-depth information about the topics.

Now that you have a recommended course, I would like to give you more tips about additional study material. Let’s go!

Week 1: Introducing User Experience Design

There you go! Your first week of studying UX Design. I hope you are excited as I am because I really like to study about UX.

This week of the course gives you a general understanding about UX Design, the roles and the responsibilities of an entry-level UX Designer. Which will be you, very soon! It is important to know which direction you would like to go to within UX, so I will advise you to read job descriptions about UX and investigate what companies are expecting. Search on LinkedIn for the different job titles within UX and read the description. This gives you a clear understanding of what companies are expecting from you.

As you can see, the first week is still very basic but no worries: you will make your hands dirty soon!

Week 2: Learning Objectives

In this part of the course, you will be introduced to the UX frameworks: user-centered design, 5 elements of UX Design & the design thinking process. It is important to know the difference between them, so I recommend you to further investigate and make notes.

Youtube

InVision — What is the UX Design Process?

AJ & SMART — Design Thinking Process (they have several interesting video’s, check them out!)

Internet

Search on the internet for bootcampux.design.cc, and search for the article: Think like a UX designer. This article is so cool! This is exactly what you need as it explains the above mentioned frameworks so super clear.

Books

Design Thinking For Strategic Innovation by Idris Mootee. Do not put the pressure on yourself to finish the book within a week. But read some pages every day.

Week 3: UX Sprint

In the third week of the Google UX Design course, you will learn about Design Sprints. I am not going to explain in detail what this is all about as it is not the purpose of the article. I only want to mention that it is very important in the UX Design process so a deeper dive into the topic is needed!

I am a huge fan of the Youtube channel from AJ & Smart. They explain everything so clearly in an entertaining way. This allows you to remember so much of their material. Anyway, learn more about Design Sprint through this channel, just simply insert: AJ & SMART Design Sprint. They provide separate videos of the tasks you will accomplish each day in the design sprint. This is super interesting as you get a clear understanding of your role.

They have a lot of interesting videos, but I recommend you to first focus on design sprint as this is the topic of week 3. Otherwise, it is getting all too overwhelming!

Youtube

AJ & SMART — Design Sprint

AJ & SMART — Design Sprint Workshop

AJ & SMART — Design Sprint 2.0 MAP — Monday

Internet

The Google Design Sprint Kit — I recommend planning each day 30 minutes to read about the case studies and methodology.

Books

Design Sprint by Jake Knapp — It is a bit optimistic to go through this book within a week (or maybe you are a fast reader!) but try to read 5–10 pages each day.

Week 4: Start your online portfolio

It is time to get your hands dirty and work on your portfolio. Wait, what?! I do not have a project yet! No worries, calm down. You will only choose your website builder tool and you will work on some features like the About Me page.

The last tip that I would like to give you is to summarize what you have learned each week. This way you can more easily remember the material and you will also understand in which topic you (maybe!) need to investigate more.

Youtube

AJ & SMART — Ux Portfolio Review (What YOU need To Show UX Agencies!)

Sarah Doody — I believe Sarah is the expert in drafting portfolios. She has so many useful content online. You should also definitely check her website.

If you liked my article, please let me know if this information was helpful so I can share my study material for the second month!