Business: Hiring UX Professionals

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss what skills are essential and desirable for a UX Designer.

Each month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to us at: [email protected].

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If you’ve been working in User Experience for more than a few years, you’ve probably seen the ground shift under your feet. Job titles are multiplying, toolsets are changing, and employers are asking for skills that did not exist a decade ago. Your company might call you a UX Designer, a Product Designer, or maybe a UX Researcher who also codes in Python. Everyone claims to know what User Experience means, but the hiring market tells a different story.

A few years ago, my colleague at Mercer University, Dr. Bremen Vance, and I decided to find out what employers were really looking for. We collected nearly 15,000 UX job ads from the ten largest metropolitan areas in the US and analyzed them using text-mining tools that could identify patterns in the language of the listings. The goal for our study was to cut through the noise of opinions and look directly at how companies describe UX work when they’re hiring. Read More

It’s happened again: you’ve received a LinkedIn message or an email message from a recruiter who is attempting to interest you in the open position he’s trying to fill—or has asked whether you know of anyone who might be interested or qualified. But the message or its accompanying job description has just made you cringe. Perhaps a company was looking for a unicorn to handle both UX and development duties. Maybe the job description specified that a candidate should have a degree in “Computer Science or similar”—yes, this recently happened to me. Or, perhaps the desired qualifications are for skills that have nothing to do with the field of User Experience. Read More