I'm Lost. Struggling to Land a UX Design Job After a Career Switch

UX practitioner of 10 years here. The market is very much depressed, especially for juniors who've only done online courses. Are these courses through a bootcamp? If so, does the bootcamp have any sort of career center that you can utilize?

I also see that you've only applied for 20 jobs. That's really not enough, especially in these tough times. As an example, a job for a junior that was posed by my prior company ended up getting 1000 applicants. Have you asked your UX mentor if any of their connections are hiring juniors? If so, your mentor should be able to put in a good word for you and at least get your foot in the door.

My friend switched to UX from not-a-programmer job (and after longish CV gap) and it took her 9 months to land job. She had her ups and downs but she was persistent, also she met a few good souls who gave her a bit of coaching along the way.

So, don't give up, you might be closer than you think.

1. Find an open source project, contribute to it. You’ll make connections, sharpen your tools and collaborate with a team.

2. Do a ux case study of emerging technology. It’s much easier to get a job in a sector where no one has ‘years’ experience.

3.Build something. Take your skills further and build something, and try and sell it. Most ux’er have little knowledge of end to end product, I.e what decisions are trade-offs are needed to build, sell and market a product. Build something and lean into the full product cycle.

1. Where did you link your portfolio?

2. You said you applied to 20 companies, that seems very low

3. Have you tried to provide your services on a marketplace like upwork etc?

4. Have you tried to contact local companies and offer to re-do their sites for a small fee and a good recommendation letter?

5. Do you go out networking at local meetups/events?

6. Did you hire/asked someone to review your resume and improve it?

Don't give up, there are many things you can do!

Hey, I switched to design in my 30s as well. In my case, it was easy because I was working as a programmer for a consulting company already, and could just ask to take on more and more design responsibilities. The advantage with small consultancies is that they have a constant churn of shortish jobs, so you get plenty of reps in across different areas. My recommendation, then, would be to look for contracting or consulting jobs. As a side benefit for the worker, it's not terribly hard to get poached by a client if they like you.

Also, recognize two things:

1. Not getting a job you apply for doesn't mean you suck, or that you aren't valuable, or that you won't ever get hired. If this is your first software job, you may not know it in your bones yet, but the hiring process in our industry is flat out broken, don't let it break you too.

2. This is a tough time to apply for jobs across the board.

Be more specific about UX. For example do you mean product designer or frontend web developer?

If you mean frontend web developer learn React. Take all the glitter away and your goals are just put text on screen and manage events. As a beginner everything will be about “how to write code”. Think of it as extreme vanity but in code. Then later you can graduate to configuration junkie. That is why I moved on.

Lots of great advice in this thread. If you're looking to add something real and live you can show to companies, to your portfolio, I'm currently working on a side project and doing all the code and design. I would love some help with the design. It's a job board/ATS. If you're interested, please email me!

I’d be happy to take a look at your résumé and portfolio and provide some feedback & next steps. My email is in my profile.

Maybe a role where you can make use of your design skills as well would be a good fit as well?

How many applications did you send out so far?