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For many UX designers, like me, we are transitioning careers from a non-design area. I have interviewed 50+ career change UXDs about how they prepared for their resumes. I surprisingly found the pain points they have been through:

1. Feel unconfident about being a career transitioner

I have written an article about:

Most of the current UXDs are career transistors. Many of them are working for big tech companies. Having past working experience is a great thing for your UX career. User experience design is all about having empathy and understand users. Find out their pain points and figure out the best solutions.

No matter what you did before, trust me, you will find some related connections. I will list the example below.

2. Don’t know how to tail experience into your resume

One of my interviewees told me, he is a flight attendant, the job has nothing to do with the UX.

Omg! A flight attendant is the most UX-related job in my eyes.

• First, a flight attendant is direct customer-faced and can get the feedback firsthand, which is very similar to user research.
• Second, flight attendants are empathetic about spotting customer complaints and providing solutions related to finding pain points, and prioritizing the best solutions.
• Third, A flight attendant is a good communicator and listener, valuable for stakeholder interviews and communication.

3 steps to tail your experience into UX resume

👉 1. Know your goals and check the job description

• First of all, you need to find out what’s the best role in UX for you. As this industry has been booming in recent years, there are many new roles, and job titles come out in the market, such as UX writer; UX researcher; Service designer; UX strategist; content designer, etc
• After you have decided what role you want to apply for. Go to the job board liked LinkedIn and check the job descriptions.

🔆 Example:

Let’s say you are a travel agent who self-taught some HTML/CSS skills, and now you want to reframe your resume to apply for a UX designer role.

Let’s see what a UXD job description is:

Keywords of hard skills :

Prototyping; Design tools ; coding (plus)

Keywords of soft skills:

Communication; detail-oriented; quick-learner; proactive attitude; under pressure ; problem-solving

👉 2. Check your past working experience job description and find similarities.

Let’s see what a travel agent’ job description is:

From the list, we can’t tell any required hard skills.

Keywords of soft skills :

Research; Review; handle issues; individual needs;

🌟 Similarities:

Both jobs require understanding customer needs, doing research, solve problems, quick learning, communications.

👉 3. Reframe your experience

Try to use the UX related words to describe your past working experience:

• Communicated with customers directly via LiveChat and phone to meet their travel booking needs
• Collected customer feedback on different travel products, analyzing client preference by making the monthly spreadsheet
• Solved urgent problems for customers during booking and travel, raising customer satisfaction from 65% to 95%
• Collaborated with team fina, Human resources, supply train to make sure clients’ booked trips going smoothly
• Quickly adapted to the fast change of the tourism industry and helped create new travel products.

For the hard skills part, if you self learning or joined a Bootcamp, you can add it like:

• Quickly learned the knowledge of design tools, research methods such as persona, prototyping, Sketch, and Figma.
• Got certification for HTML/CSS/self-taught basic coding skills etc