How I shifted from art marketing to UX
By: Mandy Ding
Tags: Design, UX, Career Development, Careers, User Experience

Discover your competitive advantages, and use them!

After intensive studies on different aspects of UX, it is easy to nod and say “Yup, now I have diversified skillsets that make me qualified for most of the entry-to-mid-level UX roles”. And that is great! But how can you distinguish yourself from all the well-trained candidates in UX interviews? In other words, what is your uniqueness of being a marketer-turned-designer versus designers with other backgrounds?

I mainly used 2 ways to continuously discover and grow my competitive advantages:

First, apply transferable skills in design practices and job hunting

The experience from the previous career will almost always be an asset if it is well utilized. My backgrounds in fine art and digital marketing provided me with plenty of transferable skills, including soft skills such as empathy to customers, time management, stakeholder relationship management, and teamwork; hard skills such as extensive knowledge of visual design guidelines, ability to communicate ideas and tell stories in an articulate and lucid manner, and ability to drill down insights in data through analytics tools.

I strived to utilize these existing skills as much as possible when working on design projects and setting up my portfolio. For instance, I created a set of illustrations and inserted them into my portfolio case studies to showcase my visual abilities. I also demonstrated my quantitative analysis skills by explicitly listing the UX success metrics and corresponding outcomes.

Figuring out and utilizing your strengths in a new job field is not easy, but if you can get to a place where yours has true meaning and power, it gives you a valuable advantage in everything you do.

Second, conduct UX skill self-assessment periodically

Every other month, I used the provided sheet in this article to do UX skill self-assessment by giving myself a score in each of the 18 UX sub-disciplines. In this way, I tracked my UX learning progress, and gained a clearer idea of how to proactively “sell” myself to different types of companies.

credit to undraw.co

When interviewing with companies that seek candidates with solid research backgrounds, I presented case studies that can best showcase my thorough understanding of UX research methodologies, and my ability to use synthesized findings to inform design decisions. When interviewing with companies that look for candidates who can also handle visual design initiatives, I emphasized my visual background and aesthetic sense by giving concrete examples.

However, there were times that I inevitably exposed my shortcomings — some companies prefer candidates who understand front-end coding, and I had zero experience in that. It was frustrating that some good opportunities slipped away because of this weakness, but after following up with some hiring recruiters, I realized that the companies didn’t really expect all UX Designers to ace programming languages, yet they preferred well-rounded candidates that can work seamlessly with the development teams.

Therefore, I booked an hour on my calendar every day to learn online courses that could broaden my technical knowledge. Right now, I am still not a designer that you would ask to code, but I can confidently say that I can collaborate with the engineering team to ensure feasibility during all the design phases, and I always keep technological constraints in mind.