Finding your first job as a UX designer (Guide)

Who is this guide for

This guide is for new UX designers looking to get their first job in the industry. The pre-requisite is that you have been studying or practicing UX design for at least 3 months or more. I've tailored it towards self-taught designers, university students, boot camp graduates, or career-switchers.

🔑 If you haven’t practiced design for at least 3 months, please DM me on Twitter for guidance on how to get started and self-learn design. I’ll try my best to point you in the right direction.

About this guide

I've been a designer for 12 years. When I first started out – I fumbled and made lots of mistakes. For my first job, I applied to 80+ companies, heard back only from 7-8 of them, and…they all outright rejected me. This guide is based on the following experiences:

• Being a design freelancer and working with 2 agencies (Drive Digital and Briteweb)
• 3 internships with Microsoft & Facebook
• Leading design at my own startup (NextBillion)
• Leading growth and design at a venture-backed startup (Memberstack)
• Helping startup founders hire designers via DesignBake

So I’ve been on all sides of the table — as a job-seeker, hiring manager, and recruiter. I'm writing this guide to help new designers be 10x more efficient in finding their first job.

If at any point in this guide, you have questions, suggestions, or feedback — please DM me on Twitter and I'll do my best to answer.‍

How to apply this guide

This guide is tactical – this means that you need to apply each chapter as you read it. Don't read the entire guide in one sitting. Instead, read a chapter → apply it → read the next chapter.

If you simply follow this guide and execute the process — I guarantee you that you will find your first job within 12 weeks.

Ready? Let’s go.

Introduction

99% of people take a scattershot approach in finding their first UX design job — where you just blindly apply to as many jobs as you can and wait back for someone to offer you a job. Unfortunately, in most cases, this approach does not work.

Instead, we will approach your job search with a structured process. Here are some guiding principles we will keep in mind:

1. 💪 Portfolio over everything else: A high-quality design portfolio will get anyone hired — even if they have no resume, experiences, university education, or accomplishments to show. Most hiring managers can tell in 20 seconds of looking at your portfolio whether they want to interview you or not — it’s the most important piece of your job search and it needs to be high-quality.
2. 🧑‍🍳 Quality over quantity: A portfolio with 2 incredible projects is better than one with 10 mediocre projects. We will focus on the quality of your portfolio projects, not the quantity.
3. 📮 Intentional outreach: Rather than quickly spamming 100 job applications on Linkedin, we will instead intentionally spend multiple hours applying to each company through all available means (more on this later). This maximizes your chances of hearing back from the companies you are interested in working with. This is hard to do, but also effective.

Your Job Search Process

Here’s the step-by-step process we'll follow to get you a UX job:

Chapter 1. Portfolio Preparation: 1 big portfolio project + 1 small portfolio project

Chapter 2. Website & Resume: Online Website + Resume

Chapter 3. Iterate on Materials: Collect feedback on your materials from 5 designers at least. Most people skip this step — they iterate during outreach instead of iterating on quality before reaching out to companies.

Chapter 4. Outreach (15 hours/week): Once ready to apply, source & find 25 companies every week, email their designers, do informational interviews, and ask for referrals or network connections

Chapter 5. Interview & Offer

Chapter 1: Preparing your portfolio

Writing a case study

In order to write a complete case study as a story, here are the 7 elements we need to showcase:

1. Introduction
2. Problem statement or scope
3. Discovery and research
4. Ideation
5. Prototyping + wireframing
6. User Testing Insights
7. Visual Design
8. Final solution + Outro

If you don’t have a project that includes all the steps above...
You need to make up a hypothetical problem statement, and take it through these steps. If you need to do this, stop reading this guide here and go work on this project. This is the most important step of your job search.

If you have a project that partially fits this description…
Set aside some time to add the missing steps from above. For example, if you did a mobile design project up until the wireframing stage, you should spend 5-10hrs to add the other stages to it.

For reference, here are some examples of portfolio pages that roughly follow this template:

• ‍Siddhant Mehta‍
• Tammy Taabassum‍
• Sharon Yeun Kim‍
• Amit Patel

Template to write a case study

Assuming you have picked a project here to present, we are going to put together a case study for it. Use Notion or Google docs to write the first draft of this project so that you don’t get caught up in the tools and visuals yet. The goal is to keep the word count to <4 sentences PER stage below.

Follow this framework to write your case study:

1. Introduction

Give it a 3-5 word title. Add a cover image that shows a sneak-peek into the end result. Write about your specific role on the project. If you worked with anyone else, mention their name and role. Write how much time you spent on the project (in weeks). Write what tools you used along the way. Write 2-3 sentences giving context on the project and what the starting point was. Mention the end goal of the project. Write 1 line about the end result — what the deliverables were and how it went for you.

2. Problem statement or scope‍

Write 2-3 sentences about the problem statement. Write about how you decided next steps and how you planned to explore and understand the problem.

3. Discovery and research

‍Write 2 sentences about the methods you used to do initial research. Write 3 bullet points highlighting the main things you learned about the problem or users in the process. Add 1-2 images of you doing research, or showing examples of the users you’re designing for.

4. Ideation

‍Focus on showing your ideation. Use visuals and images more than words if possible. Write 2 sentences on the various types of ideas you explored and how they relate to the research above. Write 1 sentence about which ideas you narrowed down to and why.

5. Prototyping and Wireframing

‍Again, show not tell. Try to show visuals of wireframes or prototypes you made for the ideas above. Highlight why you made these prototypes and what challenges you ran into while making them. Write 1-2 sentences on what you learned in this phase of the project.

6. User Testing Insights

‍Show or write about how you reached and tested some of these prototypes with users. Highlight how many interviews you did, how long they were, and your 3 main learnings from doing the interviews or testing. Don’t paste your entire “interview script” here.

7. Visual Design

‍This is an incredibly important step. Take the time to show your work and the iterations you went through to make progress towards a final solution. Show device mockups, UI details, any GIFs showing working prototypes, etc. Highlight 2-3 main aspects you focused on in the visual design and why. Write about how this relates to the phases that came before this step.

‍8. Final solution

‍Present 1 final visual of the final solution. This can be a collage of images, a GIF, or device mockups. Again, take the time to present this as neatly as you can — most new designers don’t give enough importance to showcasing what the end result was. Write 1-2 sentences about how you arrived at the final solution and how you wrapped up the project

9. Credits, Reflection, or Learning (bonus)

‍It’s always nice to read a little reflection at the end of the piece. Credit and thank the people that helped you along the way in this project. Write 2-3 sentences about the most challenging aspects of the project, what you learned, and what this experience taught you.

A small portfolio project

Your small portfolio project is an opportunity to showcase your strengths and dive deeper into one aspect of the ‘general design process’. Not that just because it’s a small project doesn’t mean that we will compromise on quality. Keep a high bar.

This is ideally a project that is one or more of the following:

• A self-initiated project that you did for fun
• A team, class, group, hackathon project where you focused heavily on one aspect of the project (eg: Research)
• A project that you’re really proud of

I won’t highlight too much on how to write about this, but you can take inspiration from the process above to write this one as well.

Chapter 2: Website + Resume

Building your personal website

Do NOT build a portfolio website from scratch. There are too many little things to keep in mind while designing a website, and missing these details will 100% hurt your chances of hearing back for an interview.

Instead, I’d recommend Squarespace or Framer to do this. Here are 2 templates you can use:

1. Squarespace: Beaumont Template

2. Framer: Dana Template (Home 2)

Here is a step-by-step for what you need to add to your website:

1. Homepage with preview images for 2 projects
2. About Page with 2 paragraphs and a photo of you
3. Page that links to your resume (below)

Make sure there are no typos and that it looks good on mobile.

Your Resume

This is a necessary step but one that most new designers over-index on. We are going to spend the least amount of time we can to bring it to a shareable state and pause there.

As a designer, your resume is not going to get you the job — your portfolio is. Unlike most others that spend a majority of the time revising their resumes to look incrementally better, we are going to instead spend that time on our portfolio and outreach process.

For resume inspiration, here are some that I like:

• ‍Athyuttam_Eleti.pdf‍
• Tammy_Taabassum_resume.pdf‍
• christyhuresume.pdf‍
• Tushar Gupta - Product Designer 2 - Sept 2022.pdf

Here’s a template to write about each experience:

💡 Project Leader and Design Volunteer, XYZ Foundation
June 2019 — Sept 2019 • Accra, Ghana
• Volunteered to help redesign an animal shelter website as a solo designer
• Redesigned 2 pages with feedback from all stakeholders in each step of the design process
• Presented weekly iterations to the leadership team until designs were finalized
• Polished and handed over design work to the engineering team

Things to keep in mind when writing your resume:

• Don’t overcrowd it.
• Keep it to 1-page only. No exceptions.
• Build it in Word or Pages so that the resulting PDF is machine scannable—don’t use Figma or Illustrator for this!
• Be clear about your role & impact in each experience you cite.
• Use action words like “Redesigned”, “Led”, “Improved”, etc instead of “Responsible for X, Y and Z”
• Use bullet points if possible – not more than 4 per role or experience
• Don’t stress if you don’t have a lot of experience to show — you are going to rely on your portfolio to prove your skills & abilities.
• Don’t ‘rate’ your skills on your resume
• Ask 3 friends to check the grammar and spot typos for you

Lastly, add a link to your website for people to download this PDF resume.

Chapter 3. Iterate on materials

Once you have a first draft of your portfolio pieces, website, and resume—your next immediate goal is to get feedback on these materials and iterate.

This is important because building your portfolio is a design project in itself — you can’t call it complete without iterating or testing it with your target users (aka other designers who will hire you).

Here are our 3 mini-goals for getting feedback:

1. Big portfolio project → Feedback from 5 designers
2. Small portfolio project → Feedback from 4 designers
3. Website & resume → Feedback from 3 designers

Type of feedback

When I say feedback, what you are looking for is not only feedback on how you are presenting this material, but also on the material itself! Make it clear that you want to improve the quality of the work you are presenting.

This is feedback that we are directly going to take action on and implement — you have to be willing to make continuous improvements to your big and small portfolio projects. Spend 70% of your time improving those, and 30% on what your website + resume look and feel like.

How to ask for feedback

To get feedback, we are going to reach out to 5 designers who have at least 5 years of design experience. You can find these folks on ADP List or Linkedin.

Note that you must ask each designer for feedback on only one thing at a time (a specific portfolio project, website, or resume).

Here’s what you can write to them:‍

Subject: Requesting design feedback on my portfolio
Hey [name]! My name is _______ and I’m a self-taught designer from ABC city (or XYZ student from LMN university).

I’m currently preparing to apply for my first job as a designer and I’d love to get your feedback and critique on [[insert specific ask]]. Would you have a few minutes to take a look? Happy to collect your feedback over email or a call.

Here’s the link to my website: www.google.com

Thank you,
[Your Name]

If you’re using Linkedin for this, in order to get feedback from 5 designers, you’ll probably have to email or reach out to at least 15-20 of them. You can assume that 10-20% of people you reach out to will reply and offer to help.

Taking action on feedback

Once you get feedback from the first 1-2 designers, you can pause outreach and start implementing their feedback. If you get conflicting feedback on anything — you’re probably doing good — just trust your intuition on whether or not you want to take that feedback. You’ll likely get 5-10 pieces of feedback from each person. You can prioritize them and use that as a checklist of improvements to make.

⚠️ The important part here is to take the feedback and send them an updated version of your portfolio within 7 days.

If you decided not to implement a certain piece of feedback, you can also politely mention that to them — I promise you they won’t be sad or mad. This step is important for a few reasons:

1. It shows that you are actually doing what they are recommending. This is a way to build trust with a senior designer, to show them you valued their feedback, and to get them as a supporter on your journey.
2. It opens the door for ongoing conversation and check-ins. You can email them every X months to give them an update on your design journey. Over time, they could even become your main go-to mentors or advisors when it comes to career decisions.
3. Seeing your effort and proactiveness, they will be more likely to support you with introductions, feedback, and job referrals. If you build trust with them, they will extend their network to you.

Repeat this process of feedback and iteration till you apply the main pieces of feedback from each designer and share the iterations back with them.

In total, you would have received 5-10 pieces of feedback × 12 designers = 60-120 pieces of feedback.

By the end of this step — you’ll likely learn a ton about design in this process, and have a rock-solid toolkit prepared for your job search.

Phew, if you’ve made it till here, congratulations! You are more than 50% of the way through in getting your first job.

Chapter 4: Outreach (15 hours/week)

Once you’re done iterating on your resume and portfolio, you can shift gears to focus on outreach and getting referrals to jobs.

🔑 A referral is a formal word used in the hiring process — it means that an existing employee at a company refers someone in their network to be considered for a specific job. Referrals are the most sure-shot way of getting interviews at companies that you’re applying to.

At most companies, a referral basically means that you are automatically pushed to the top of the list for prospects that are being considered for interviews. There’s probably a 90%+ chance that if you have a solid portfolio and are referred, you will likely hear back to schedule your first interview. This is how I got my first internship at Microsoft.

Referrals are your best shot at getting interviews at companies, followed by cold emails.

Chances are, if you’re new to the industry, you might be wondering how you can get referrals if you don’t have a ‘network’. Don’t worry—that’s exactly what we’ll tackle next.

In this step, we will run a weekly process till you find a job:

1. Find 25 companies you can work at
2. Find 1-4 designer(s) at each company on this list
3. Contact each designer to request informational interviews
4. At the end of each 30min chat, ask for a referral to their company or connections within their network

We’ll repeat this every week so that you have a steady stream of outbound attempts to reach companies each week.

⚠️ PS: You can also leverage all the designers that gave you feedback in the previous step for potential referrals. You will only be able to successfully get referrals if you actually implemented their feedback and followed up with an updated portfolio.

Find 25 companies

Goal: Make a list of 25 companies you want to work at.

Here comes the non-design work that most new designers struggle to organize. Our goal is to find 25 companies that have previously hired at least 1 designer.

Most of the companies you add to this list should be ones explicitly hiring entry-level designers. However, you can also add any company <500 employees (also called an early/mid stage startup) that may not be specifically hiring an entry-level designer, but is interesting to you.

⚠️ You might need Linkedin premium for some of the action items below. It will likely cost around $40/mo along with a 30-day trial if you haven’t already used it before. I would recommend signing up for Linkedin Career Navigator while you are in the process of a job search — it is worth the investment.

Use this spreadsheet to organize the companies and fill out the information in each column.

Places where you can find companies you could work at:

• Google search for top software companies
• Google search for top software companies in your area
• YC Company list
• Google maps search for design agencies in your city/country
• Search jobs on Linkedin or Indeed

This step is purely just research. Don’t get distracted by trying to apply for anything yet. We will get to that shortly. We will work through 25 companies in each cycle so that it’s manageable. I would estimate that it will take about 2 hours to scout and note down basic information for 25 companies.

Find 1-4 designers at each company

Here’s how you can find designers at each company:

• Go to Linkedin and type in the company name
• Search for designers who currently work at that company
• Google search their name to find their portfolio (no worries if you can’t find one)

To find their email address, you can either browse their portfolio for a contact email, or you can use Hunter.io to find their professional email address.

Use this spreadsheet as a starting point and fill in each column.

🔑 PS: If at any point, Linkedin limits your search results or stops you from finding more designers, I would recommend paying for Linkedin Pro to keep going. You’ll likely only need it for 1-2 months, and you will earn this amount back (and more) from using it.

Cold email each designer

Now that we have a list of designers, here’s the exciting step! You will:

• Apply for a role at the company (if they have a job post you can apply to)
• Email the designers you found at this company
• Ask for a 20min informational chat
• Ask for a referral to the job

You are going to email them first and then message them on Linkedin immediately after. Use the spreadsheet above to track the date of outreach, and follow-up twice — if they don’t reply within 4 business days since your last email.

1. First Email

✉️ Subject: Curious to learn from you about [[COMPANY]]

Hey [name]! Super inspired by your career journey in design and the work you’re doing at [[COMPANY]].

My name is _______ — I’m a self-taught designer (or student) from ABC city or university.

I would love to learn more about your work as a [[ROLE]] at [[COMPANY]] and what it’s like to be a designer there. Super curious about what your day to day is like, the company culture, and how you got your start as a designer in the industry.

Would you be open to a 20min coffee chat with me anytime this week or next?

Thank you,[your_name]www.yourportfoliolink.com

‍

b. Follow up #1

Send this email if they don’t reply within 4 business days after the first email.

Hey [[NAME]] — just wondering if you received my last email? Would love to learn more about your journey as a designer, super excited to connect with you.

Follow up #2

Send this email if they don’t reply within 4 business days after the last email.

✉️ Hey [[NAME]] — I’m guessing you have a lot on your plate. Would you be open to answering some q’s over email if that’s easier? I’d be really grateful for that. If not, no worries!

Linkedin Template

If you have their email:

Hey [NAME]! I’m a student at ABC university — super inspired by your journey as a designer. Just sent you an email with some q’s, looking forward to connecting!

If you don’t have their email:

Hey [NAME]! I’m a student at ABC university — super inspired by your journey as a designer. Would love to get in touch to get your advice on getting into the design industry and what it’s like to work at [[COMPANY]].

Chapter 5: Informational Interviews

The goal of your chat with them is to learn about their journey. Here are some questions you can ask to get the conversation going:

• When did you first start learning design? How did you decide to pursue design?
• What was it like getting your first job in the industry?
• What’s it like to work at your current [[COMPANY]]?
• What does your day-to-day look like?
• What does [[COMPANY]] look for in a designer?

Last 5 mins of the conversation. Most importantly, towards the end of the chat, you should make 2 requests to them:

1. Referral: “Thank you for the chat! I really enjoyed learning X & Y from you. I just applied for a role at [[COMPANY]] – if you there’s anything you can do to refer me for the role, I’d really appreciate it!”
2. Connection: “Also, are there any other designers in your network I could speak to about their design career?”

Repeat this process every week. Block out 5-10hrs per week to do this.

You’ll soon have incredible momentum in your first job search — you will be networking, building connections, and getting referrals to jobs all in one go. You will also meet incredible designers and supporters along the way.

In 1-2 weeks of doing this, you should start hearing back from some recruiters, getting referrals to jobs, and hopefully your first interview (or more) scheduled.

5. Interview + Offer

I’ll write about preparing for interviews separately. DM me if you’d be interested in reading more about this. For now, I’d recommend Tanner’s book here: A Designer's Guide to Interviewing

If you get an offer, DM me. I can help you make sure you’re negotiating the best salary you can. You should always negotiate for a better offer.

FAQ

Why only 2 portfolio projects?

• All you need to convince a company about the qualify of your craft is 1 high-quality big portfolio project and 1 high-quality small passion project. The reason I recommend this is to make it easy to decide what goes into your portfolio. It helps you focus all your attention on 2 projects and everything else becomes noise.
• This also makes it easier for anyone that’s evaluating your work — most recruiters or hiring managers only end up looking at 1-2 pieces, so they might as well be your best pieces.
• By having just 2 portfolio pieces, you can focus on the storytelling, craft, content, and quality of what you’re presenting. You’re not presenting 5 projects where one of them is detailed and the other 4 are just low-quality pieces. In our approach here, we’re going for quality over quantity.
• I can bet that 1 high quality project will be more likely to get you a job offer than 5 projects of medium or low quality.

Additional notes

• Writing style: Don’t try to use elaborate words. Try to write in simple language — your grandma should be able to understand what work you did in each step of the design process. Don’t clump more than 3-4 sentences at any given point on the page. Use Hemingway app to keep the reading level at Grade 6-7. Don’t write a literal step-by-step description of your process — instead, keep it focused on what you learned from running the process and your takeaways. Use of GIFs is recommended to show prototypes or motion. Don’t use video to show your work unless you know how to make it look and feel good.
• Images: Use clear images that can be interpreted without having to zoom in or pinch to read the text. Take the time to crop images nicely. When showing device-specific mockups, use device frames to show the work instead of just adding a grid of images. Use both literal and contextual images to keep readers interested. Literal images can be wireframes, design mocks, etc. Contextual images can be ones showing your primary users, a photo of you interviewing a user, a photo of your sticky note brainstorm, whiteboards, etc.
• 🎯 Focused on actions: There are a million ways to get distracted in your job search. Don’t procrastinate by reading more blogs, more social media posts, or getting more advice instead of focusing on the process below.
• 🔎 Learn how to learn: If you get stuck anytime — your first instinct should be to try and figure it out yourself — search Google, YouTube, Twitter, blog posts on the topic, and try to solve it yourself. If all else fails, only then should you reach out to friends or mentors for help on it.

Recommended Practices

A Taste in Good Design

To be a good designer, you need to be able to identify what good design is. The only way to get better at identifying good design is to consume lots of design (take the broadest definition of this you can think of), observe the details, form an opinion on what’s good and what’s not, and read or hear other people’s thoughts on design.

For example — when you’re grocery shopping, observe the different design choices made in the brand design, packaging, colours, fonts, stickers, content, etc. Observe design choices both big and small. Ask yourself why things might have been designed a certain way. When you’re booking your next concert or flight, observe the things you like or dislike about the process.

If you find a design you really like — take some time to recreate it in Figma. It has been my favourite way to learn about how seasoned designers think, the details they pay attention to, and what I might be missing in my craft.

Speaking the language

I would recommend learning how designers communicate by going on YouTube — searching for conference talks from seasoned designers, and watching 1 talk everyday for 30 minutes. That’s all.

The reason this method works is that it tells you:

1. How good designers talk about their process, work, and team
2. What words, phrases and terms you can use to present yourself and your work as a designer
3. Lastly, as a side-effect of doing this, you will also get a sense for what good design is, and learn about a new topic each day.

Being able to speak the language of a designer when you’re interviewing is an invaluable skill. When I gave my design internship interviews at Facebook, this helped me get my work and ideas across in a way that aligned with how designers in the industry were already working.

This goes without saying, but you need to approach everything in this process as a learning opportunity. No one wants to hire someone that thinks they know it all, or someone that is not easy to work with.

That's all for now, thank you for reading! If you found this guide helpful, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend. If you have any feedback or comments, just DM me on Twitter. Thank you!