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Are you looking for a transition? If yes, this is a perfect article for you.

As a UX professional, you know that the skills you gained as a researcher are marketable. The challenge is finding an entry point into the field without investing another decade of your life and another six-figure debt to get there. Working in academia or being an academic is not easy. It’s challenging, time-consuming, and the pay is not very good. Job security is nonexistent (aside from tenure track positions), and contracts are short-term with no future prospects.

What’s more: working in academia is also not very lucrative; even after taking into account the affordable cost of living that comes with living somewhere like Buffalo, NY. Working as a UX professional isn’t quite so challenging or financially restrictive — unless you are transitioning from academia to UX. What are some of the challenges involved in transitioning from academia to UX?

A little bit about myself: I have a double master's in Psychology with a thesis each (one from India and the other from the USA) and I was desperately looking for a change. If you are reading this, I am sure you are too. A few years ago, I came across this field called User Experience, and it was love at first sight! I became so curious that I kept reading about what it is and what set of skills I need to learn to get into UX.

My career trajectory: I worked in an academic environment for 5 years, 1 year at Pace University as a Research Assistant, and the other 4 years with Harvard Medical School professor at his non-profit as a Research Associate. I thoroughly enjoyed the work and learned many practical applications to the theories I learned at University. In the process, I published a few research articles in peer-reviewed journals and presented them at various national and international conferences.

I had never heard anyone in my psychology department or academic world talking about UX before, it was like this field came out of nowhere in my life, and now I have transitioned into a full-time UX Researcher role in the industry. Let’s learn how I did it!

The transition from academia to UX is a career pivot.

If you are currently an academic, you are probably used to working independently and with a narrower scope of projects and responsibilities. UX is a broader field that involves many areas and disciplines. You will need to expand the range of your skills and gain additional expertise, which takes time. Academia is also a very competitive environment. Students are vying for limited positions, and there are always more qualified candidates than positions. In UX, you will likely be able to get a position with fewer credentials and work your way up, rather than starting at the bottom of a very competitive career ladder.

You will likely need to learn new skills and tools.

The culture of academia and the culture of UX are very different. You will need to learn how to collaborate and communicate with people who are not scientists in addition to learning new UX tools and methodologies. Learn how to work with stakeholders, clients, and other project team members who are not as concerned with research, methodology, and data.

What Skills I learned in Academia — Psychology Research

I started looking into what skills I had to understand what skills I need. Despite the slow and self-paced academic environment, I learned a LOT! Here is a list of some:

• Making assumptions and developing a hypothesis
• Challenging these assumptions throughout the study
• Addressing in-depth literature reviews
• Recruiting Participants — if you studied psychology, I am sure you have gone through this painful process of finding subjects for experiments. This helped me with the awkward small talk and built a great rapport with the participants.
• Cleaning data, and analyzing the results.
• Writing and conveying your findings
• It made me focus on the micro details and think rationally before jumping into making decisions.
• Working independently and collaboratively
• Making impactful presentations

Wow! that’s quite a lot, right?

Skills required in User Experience Research

These soft skills include:

• Curiosity or a desire for learning
• Emotional intelligence
• Critical Thinking
• Strong communication skills
• Confidence
• Passion
• Empathy
• Listening skills
• Growth mindset (comfortable with failure and learning from it)
• Humility
• Problem-solving
• Creativity
• Being a team player

Learn how to approach your work as a product designer and create high-level concepts, designs, and rigorously test them. Learn how to conduct user research, design personas, and validate designs with quick and dirty prototyping. You will also need to learn new skills, such as how to use different design software (especially prototyping tools like InVision, Sketch, or Rapid prototyping tools) and other UX team tools.

What is Transferable?

Everything!

I am not exaggerating! For instance, you could transfer the small talk skills you used while looking for participants for your psychology experiments. It’s a good rapport-building skill, and also transfers empathy skills you used to empathize with your subjects/participants. Comment down if you think of more!

Where did I learn these New UX Skills?

There are a lot of free materials available online. Podcasts, Youtube videos, UX Facebook groups, books, email listserv, and so on. I will list a few of them in the references. If you know more, please leave it in a comment and help the community!

Networking is the Key

Academia is an insular culture, and the transition to UX is not necessarily an easy one. UX professionals often collaborate with other UX professionals, especially when it comes to things like user research, but also for design and other aspects of the job. Academics tend to be more territorial, and you will likely need to build new networks from scratch. This is a long process, and you should put networking at the top of your list of things to do. Be honest about where you are in your career, where you want to be, and what you want to do. This will help you to find people who can help you, and you can help them, too!

Create a Portfolio

I am sure you have heard a lot about this! Let me emphasize it, this is really important, you need to show the application of what you have learned through pet projects/internships, etc. A research portfolio could be a word document/PPT slides/PDF or even a medium page. Check out my article on how to find project ideas for a UX portfolio here: https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-find-project-ideas-for-ux-portfolio-f780e2b8b347

Conclusion

The transition from academia to UX is a career pivot. You will likely need to learn new skills and tools and network heavily to find your first UX job. Employers hire you for what you know, not what you will learn. You need to be able to demonstrate that you are able to do the job well and have relevant experience. The key to successfully transitioning from academia to UX is to show that you can do the job well and that you are a quick learner — with as little experience as possible. If you are committed to making the transition from academia to UX, then there is nothing keeping you from achieving that goal. With the right skills, experience, and approach, you can find a great career in UX. All you need to do is put in the work and stay positive!

There are limited well-paying careers after graduating with a psychology degree. For those who don’t like clinical therapy/counseling, I would highly recommend you look into this field and consider a future job in UX!

You might have difficulty leaving your academic identity, but push yourself to adapt to a new industry identity. You can do this!