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Don’t Sell Yourself Short-Sighted

When you’re determined to break into a field like User Experience, it can be easy to end up with tunnel vision. You live, eat, breathe and sleep UX without giving so much as a passing thought to other roles. It may seem counterintuitive, but this focus can negatively affect your job-seeking efforts and blind you to potential opportunities.

The thing about tunnel vision is when you’re in the tunnel, you tend to be completely unaware of it. Even if you are aware of it, you may actually consider it a good thing. Why should you care about databases and code repositories? That’s for developers to deal with. Analysing an increase in page bounce rates? Sounds like a job for the marketing team. You’re not being short-sighted; you’re just fully immersed, right?

There’s No ”I” in Career Advancement

The problem with this siloed way of thinking is that when you eventually snag a UX gig, you’ll discover your work rarely if ever, happens in a silo. Pick any web-related job ad at random, and 99% of the time, you’ll find one or more of the following phrases: “Must be a team player”, “Ability to work well in a team”, “Clearly communicate ideas and discuss feedback with team members” — team, team, team. Irrespective of the client or project, nothing is achieved in a vacuum; you’re just one player in the team.

As is the norm these days, you’ll be one of many applicants for any given job — the word “many” can’t be emphasised enough. The influx of aspiring UXers flooding the market far outnumbers the companies in the space, and those companies can only hire so many people. Standing out is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s critical if you’re to have a chance of getting yourself in front of an interview panel.

An important distinction needs to be made here: when it comes to job applications, standing out doesn’t just mean being different. It doesn’t mean using a prettier font or more colours on your resume. It means being the applicant whose knowledge and experience go beyond the boilerplate skill set of everyone else. This is a case where just being a specialist won’t make you special.

Exercise Your Peripheral Vision

Sure, you may get by just knowing your co-workers' titles for a while, but you’ll be severely limiting how effective you can be within the team, your projects, and your career. By investing small amounts of time in educating yourself on the roles around you, you’ll be rewarded every day by the advantages it brings, advantages that go both ways. You’ll find it much easier to communicate your ideas, thoughts, and concerns with your teammates in a clear and relevant way. At the same time, they’ll appreciate being able to discuss aspects of their work with you without getting a look of bewildered confusion in response.

These benefits also extend to your interactions with customers. If you’re meeting with a client and have a broad understanding of what is being sold, developed, and delivered, you can say less and achieve much more. Even the occasional contribution demonstrating the breadth of your knowledge will build trust with that client. That trust and the confidence it instils may be the difference between sealing the deal and the project being taken to another supplier. These are the moments that take you from replaceable resource to essential employee in the eyes of management.

Focus on the Fundamentals

You don’t need to become an expert on every aspect of every role in the entire web industry and beyond. There are only so many hours in the day and cells in your brain. Just take a step back and look at the overall project process from end to end — tenders to testing, requirements to release. Look at all the roles involved in this process and pick out the peripheral skills of each. These are the skills you can pick up in a relatively short amount of time and have a crossover with your work. The overlaps between roles will range from subtle to blatantly obvious, but all of them will be beneficial.

“Peripheral skills…are skills not immediately critical to your profession but do tend to set you apart.”
— Alan Weiss, PhD

Unless a particular subject grabs your interest and pulls you in, you’re not looking to acquire the same depth of knowledge as those whose jobs revolve around it. A suitable level to aim for is being able to answer “yes” to the question, “If other team members were discussing this topic in a meeting, would I be able to give meaningful input?”. When you get to this point and the opportunity arises, don’t just nod your head and follow along — offer that meaningful input.

You’re not the only person who gets tunnel vision, it happens to everyone. Your “external” perspective may be just the thing to break someone else out of their analysis paralysis or help them realise a solution right before them but too close to be seen. The other party will be grateful as you’ve helped them process the problem, and senior staff will take note. It may seem small, but it will do wonders for your standing in the team and your future promotion prospects.

A Crash Syllabus in Peripheral Skills

To get you started, I’ve put together a selection of peripheral skill areas and tools I’ve found to be valuable over the years. It’s not an exhaustive list of skills, and just like those required for your role, learning them is an ongoing process that never truly ends. Use this as a basic study plan, starting wherever you like. Just chip away in your free time and add more items as you feel comfortable with one skill and discover another. It’s not at all necessary to sign up for any paid courses. Everything in this list and beyond can be learnt free of charge with a few quick Google searches.

Non-technical

• Project tender response writing
• Estimating hours required for each stage of a project
• Familiarity with each role’s purpose in a project
• How project management methodologies differ from one another
• Colour theory
• Typography
• Information architecture
• Digital marketing fundamentals
• Content design and strategy

Technical

• CSS (after HTML)
• JavaScript (after CSS)
• The names of the most popular JavaScript frameworks and their benefits (after JavaScript)
• Search engine optimisation (on-page, off-page, and technical)
• UML and database design
• Meeting and testing accessibility requirements

Tools

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Google Tag Manager
• The core concepts of WordPress, Drupal, Adobe Experience Manager, and any other enterprise CMS that gains popularity (no, not Wix)
• Marketing automation tools, e.g. Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor
• Version control tools, e.g. Github
• In-browser inspectors, e.g. Chrome DevTools
• Website testing tools and device emulators, e.g. BrowserStack

As you become familiar with these techniques and tools, you’ll start to see them everywhere in your working life — use this to your advantage. Take any opportunities to volunteer for some hands-on experience with your newfound knowledge. Realistically this may be the odd 10 minutes one day acting as a second pair of eyes for a developer or 20 minutes another day helping someone in marketing double-check an analytics report, but it all adds up.

Eventually, you won’t need to volunteer. Others will call on you for your thoughts on a problem and your input in meetings. Knowledge is one thing, but putting the skills into practice will cement that knowledge and let you add it to your resume, making you stand out even more favourably the next time you apply for a job.

Broader Horizons Lead to Broader Opportunities

One of the greatest benefits of diving into the web industry is the freedom it affords you when deciding where to take your career. The combination of working closely with other team members and the crossover of skills utilised in each job means you can shift from your current role to another if you find one that particularly piques your interest. The gaps between UX designer, UX researcher, service designer, product designer, front-end web developer, back-end web developer, project manager and countless other jobs may be much smaller than you think.

Whether you decide to move into a different role or stay focused on the one you have, always keep your eyes open to what’s happening around you and take it all in. Peripheral skills may be the light at the end of the tunnel you need to break ahead and advance your career.