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Community: Professional Development

UXmatters has published 81 articles on the topic Professional Development.

Top 3 Trending Articles on Professional Development

  1. 6 Questions to Ask Yourself When Preparing for a UX Portfolio Review

    September 6, 2021

    A portfolio review is a review of your body of work as a UX designer and a demonstration of your presentation skills and your ability to identify what is important to your audience. The process starts with preparing your work artifacts and planning what to say and how to say it—long before the portfolio review ever happens. This article details my process when preparing to present my own portfolio and what I look for in job candidates during such reviews.

    Question 1: What is the problem the design is trying to solve?

    When you’re discussing a design during a portfolio review or an interview, the first thing many interviewers look for is whether the problem you’re trying to solve is well defined. But candidates often present business goals as the problem—such as This project was a reskin—or personal goals—such as This was a class assignment. Or they completely skip over the problem and go right to the solution. Every good design starts with a clear vision of the problem you’re solving, so any discussion of a project should start with a clear problem statement. If you do not clearly articulate the problem, your audience won’t be able understand the purpose of the design, and they won’t be confident in your abilities as a UX designer. Read More

  2. Setting Yourself Apart as a Job Candidate

    Enterprise UX

    Designing experiences for people at work

    A column by Jonathan Walter
    March 20, 2023

    There are countless articles on the Web whose purpose is to help UX designers write stellar resumes or craft compelling portfolios. But through my decades-long career as a UX professional and leader, I’ve discovered other ways of helping candidates stand out. Although some of them get less fanfare, they are no less important. The observations that I’ll share in this column come from experience—not only from my own failures, successes, and learnings as a job applicant, but also as a manager who has reviewed hundreds of resumes and portfolios and interviewed dozens of candidates for UX design jobs.

    Therefore, in this column, I’ll go beyond the usual advice about creating your resume and portfolio. Instead, I’ll touch upon some other ways in which UX design candidates can stand out from other job applicants. Think of the following tips as additional arrows in your quiver that, if you use them right, can better arm you for success. These tips include the following:

    • Being selective
    • Embracing the cover letter
    • Showcasing your initiative Read More

  3. Better UX Internships

    Practical Usability

    Moving toward a more usable world

    A column by Jim Ross
    March 10, 2014

    An internship is a great way to get into the field of user experience, but internships are often failures—for both the intern and the hiring company. Why? The hiring companies often don’t have a plan for how to use their interns, and interns often don’t know how they can contribute or where they fit in.

    Whose fault is this? Both the intern and the hiring company are responsible for ensuring that an internship is meaningful and rewarding. Yet many companies hire interns without any plan for how to use them. They may think, We have a lot to do around here. We could use an intern. They then hire an intern without planning how to use that person and realize that it’s difficult to find things for the intern to do. So the intern either sits around underused or does a lot of busywork. Thus, the internship becomes a bad experience for both parties, and the company may think twice about ever hiring an intern again. Read More

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