My name is Gina, and in June 2021 I decided it was time for a big change.

After a decade of creating and managing social-web-email content for education nonprofits, I needed something else. I felt stuck.

I’ve thought about a career shift well before the COVID-19 lock down of early 2020 but the pandemic, in many ways, fueled the desire for change even more—as I imagine it did for many people with the means to make those changes or were forced by circumstance.

I gave myself one year. By June 2022 I was to have a new job, with a signed offer letter. I accomplished the switch in six months.

This is how I broke down my approach 📅

• 1-3 months of initial research into UX as a viable career option, including informational interviews
• 5-6 months of skill development and building my portfolio. This included bootcamps or other MOOCs and certification-style courses that were free or relatively cheap
• 4-6 months of actively looking for, interviewing, and ultimately securing an offer

Okay, that doesn’t neatly add up to 12 months but there’s some overlap in the plan.

Exploring UX as a career 🔍

When I first looked at UX as a possible career path, I focused on product design because that’s the information that was readily available. There wasn’t a lot of information for new UXers on research and writing as a viable entry point into UX as an industry.

Naturally, this made me a bit anxious. I had some design experience—developed out of a need in my unicorn role at nonprofits—but nothing “professional.” I was also a writer, so shifting my thinking from words to shapes was new and I had doubts. Behance and Dribbble were definitely not helping with the highly polished samples.

Bootcamps, academies, MOOCs, oh my 💻

Alternative education routes were all the rage during the pandemic. It was like everyone and their aunt had a masterclass, coaching course, certification, and so on. I enrolled in a couple of online certification courses, which I’ll only mention here but if folks are interested in reading more about what those were like, let me know and I’ll write a separate piece on those.

Cost was a major factor in what I ultimately decided. And time. I was working a full-time job that paid an okay salary but wasn’t enough to afford a multi-week, cohort-type program like General Assembly or Springboard. I also had enough debt on my plate that I didn’t want to add to it if I didn’t have to. Lots of decisions to be made.

(Udacity’s “Become a UX Designer” nanodegree landing page)

I went with this because I did their Front-End nanodegree a year prior and was satisfied with that so I figured the experience would be similar. At the time I enrolled, they were running a multi-month deal.

(Parsons x Yellowbrick’s UX Design Foundations landing page)

I enrolled in this program a few months after the Udacity ND because the content was slightly different, and I got a half scholarship that made it affordable.

Building the portfolio 🚧

This one was probably the trickiest part of the career transition. How do you convince people you’re capable in the field you’re getting into with indirect experience?

This is where things also started to shift for me.

While I learned how to create design systems, wireframes, prototypes, surveys, and tests, I stumbled across UX writing. It was a rabbit hole I fell into and I know not how I got there. Needless to say, I was very wired upon discovering this as a viable UX discipline. Suddenly, the entry gate was wider.

As I continued to work through the certifications, I changed my tactic for the portfolio. Design was still important but because I didn’t have product design to showcase, I used what I had to highlight my process in content design. This included examples of web pages I helped lay out, information architecture and the site-map, and e-blasts I designed, along with content I wrote and why I made specific decisions. (I’ll write more about specifics in another post. If you have specific questions about this, let me know.)

(A snippet of my portfolio homepage, circa 2021)

My portfolio was simple on purpose. I picked the top three projects I was really proud of that I thought showcased my ability to think design and execute strategically, while also thinking through language, voice, tone, and all the other wordy things that live in the content realm.

And it seemed to work.

Interviews

I applied to open roles early in my career switch process to learn about the hiring process and learn about what it’s like to be in UX generally. I also DM’d people on LinkedIn who posted about open roles to gauge whether my indirect skills would be worth considering.

This may be odd, but at this time—roughly four months into my plan—my main objective wasn’t to land a job. It was to get information and learn how to fill the gaps I have to successfully land a job by my June 2022 deadline.

I landed a handful of interviews, some with notable companies like Mailchimp and Eventbrite.

It’s important to note that I didn’t go Wild West application spree. I was methodical about where I applied. Even though I wasn’t applying with the intent of landing a job (yet), I did apply as though I wanted the job at the companies I applied to. If I didn’t want to work at a specific place, I didn’t apply. All told, I applied to fewer than 20 open roles over the course of about 60 days—which might seem like a lot, but compared to the “all or nothing” approach I’ve done in the past, where I’ve applied to double, even triple that, 20 is very much on the low-end.

For most of the companies I applied, I received an initial interview. I moved to the second round to even fewer. Only one came back with an offer.

I accepted and started my new role in UX as a content designer in December 2021—six months ahead of my own schedule.

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