Becoming a T Shaped UX Pro – With Ravi Singh and Germain Preston

Join the UX Coogs and HUXPA as we welcome Ravi Singh and Germain Preston for an exciting conversation about the importance of becoming a T-Shaped UX professional and what that means.

Ravi and Germain also touch on other important topics such as how to be how to define your specific motivations, the importance of GENUINE empathy, how to market yourself, and how to make the perfect pizza.

Ravi is a design executive with 25 years of experience in UX, UI, Marketing, Development, Product and User Research. He has developed high-performing research and design teams at multiple organizations, and championed and proven the business value of UX. He is currently the Vice President of Design and User Experience at PROS in Houston and is a prominent figure in the UX Community throughout the city.

all right so let’s get started probably start with an introduction let me see if this is working here there we go cool hi I’m Robie nice to meet y’all um I want to tell you a little bit about myself before we jump into the whole domain of ux and corporate work and Consulting and the kind of things that you may end up doing in your career so I’m an avid cyclist it’s one of my interests I love cycling I’ve been cycling since I was a teenager used to race and I love long distance riding I also love coffee and often I’m riding from like coffee shop to coffee shop I like to have a cortado or cappuccino something that’s going to sit light on me but give me a little energy to keep going I used to be a DJ for about 10 years I still have a pretty significant vinyl collection of a thousand records scratch house music all that good stuff you’re like why is this VP talking about DJing yes let’s continue um I was an artist um early in my career and this is a drawing I did was a copy of Da Vinci I can’t take credit for the Aesthetics is but is evidence that I know how to draw and I love pizza when I’m a pizza maker this is a photograph of one of my pizzas Margarita Pizza Neapolitan style delicious nice to look at lovely to eat and it brings people put together I’m a little obsessed with Pizza Guys and anyone that knows me knows me maybe as much as a pizza maker as as a ux designer and so these are all my pizzas right these aren’t pictures from Google and I’ve made thousands of pizzas over the last few years and as you can see I just like the pizza as a product as something that’s designable right you’ve got the dough you got the ingredients you got the Aesthetics of it and you’ve got that experience of tasting it and all these things are you know for an artist or a creative um a beautiful like field of opportunities but the other part of pizza making that I learned to love was running a business because that gave me even more opportunities to think about my inventory how do I price my product how do I let people know that I exist and I have a service to offer right social media how do I use social media and Market myself do I care about my revenue or am I just doing this for the love and what is my my my margin right there’s a business aspect to this that’s as intriguing as the design and creative aspect that made me really hungry right now because I haven’t had breakfast guys so I’ve talked about all these things that I’m interested in and there’s a lot more that makes me up makes like me as a personality having a point of view of the world and how I spend my time I’m not going to read through this whole grid of stuff but you kind of get the idea I’m into a lot of different things how is that relevant well ux isn’t really just about what you do it’s not about just making wireframes and doing research and building prototypes and working with clients and all that kind of stuff it’s a way of thinking right about how you see the world how you connect dots how you analyze and how you process all that through a design thinking mindset to create Solutions make sense yeah do people kind of relate to some of these words that I believe make up the unex Persona kind of raise your hands if you you do does anyone relate to this stuff you’re like in the right place and you’re studying the right stuff because there’s a great PR path ahead of you and this isn’t strictly just ux it could be service design could be architecture it could be many other things product design Etc right industrial design but usually those places where you are interested about the world you connect dots and you have an outlet to solve problems little OCD little OCD yeah I thought so I thought so okay so this weird mashup represents me when I was about 12 13 years old I used to program on that computer I have dated myself I understand that um and I used to have a pallet because I painted and these two things just like in your brain you have a right and left sides of your brain they can coexist I mean Einstein was a violin player right so you don’t have to be so creative that you’re not analytical and you don’t have to be so analytical and Engineering oriented that you think of yourself is not being created the two things can absolutely coexist so as you’re going down your career path this level of diversity in your thinking and adaptability to the world around you is actually an asset I thought about myself as potentially being a bit ADHD and I go well let me put that on my Cape because that’s what’s gonna help me fly through my career you know um I think we do have a lot of distractions in the world but that’s an opportunity to kind of process it and and and find tools to make something beautiful out of it so I asked myself this question especially being an executive at a software company who let me in here because I started as an artist I have my bachelor and my masters in painting and when I graduated I couldn’t pay the rent and so I found an opportunity to be a Digital Arts profess Professor so I was teaching Photoshop I was teaching HTML was learning it and I taught animation as I read the book but I kind of figured it out right adaptable creative hardworking I just kind of figured it out and that experience got me into being a web designer and a project manager some of these skills I was learning along the way uh one of the oil and gas companies I worked at had a project management course that was unbelievable so great and I’m so thankful for having had that opportunity to do that because it served me well throughout my career yeah I went from art school to oil and gas in about two years it was a bit of a transition and then I got into Consulting became a senior ux designer did some projects for Microsoft for HP for other companies took me overseas for a little bit I will say I got burned out in one year so it didn’t last very long but I got some amazing exposure doing market research usability testing product design at that time then finally made it became a manager because I wanted to be a manager for a long time and this will be a question we ask ourselves as we go through this talk it’s like what do you want to be when you grow up and I thought being a manager or being executive meant that I made it but it was really huge shift to my career because when you go higher up in the ranks you do less of what got you there in the first place and you need need to learn to let go and delegate to others but that led me into become a senior manager at other companies this is a23 billion Service Company actually a trash company not very sexy I don’t like to say that very often but uh but let’s be honest and that’s just where I met my colleague Germaine and um he will tell his story about his career growth as well and I think we actually grew a lot together because we also went to the next company together as well where I became a director of user experience and again I felt like good I’m finally getting these titles I want but with that came a shift in what my work was and what my person mission was in my mission for my team and today I’m vice president of design and user experience at Pros I’m not president of Vice President of user experience a design user experience because where we are now at our company we actually look at how we can use design to in influence all kinds of business processes across the company How We Do training how we do customer support potentially how we design our sales presentations and do our demos like we’re getting into a lot of different areas of where design can still have an incredible impact and for me after doing this for about 25 years just doing ux and usability and information architecture is not so exciting and I think folks like us have a lot more to offer so it’s given me and my team great opportunities for growth so one slide and one slide only about Pros because you’re kind of wondering well what is Pros Pros is an Enterprise software company uh we’re an AI company we deal with very very massive data sets that other companies basically expose to us so we can kind of read them look at historical Trends around their pricing and revenue and project to them kind of where they’re going if they take our recommendations so they can make millions and millions more dollars with a small investment in our software so it’s basically pricing and revenue optimization software okay kind of makes sense it’s like working with a financial advisor to take your investment and make more than you could do on your own it’s a tool for that when I joined Pros 10 years ago 11 years now we were kind of at a Crossroads and that’s why I joined because the UI was super outdated it was still built in flash it looked really old school and they recognized that user experience was the way to move forward that we could gain a bigger Market opportunity because we could appeal to uh a broader Market that car cared about ux I cared about efficiency and making their user base which is their employees more effective if they use the tools the right way they could bring more Roi to the company right and our competitors are doing this so that gave us a reason to exist at pros and that’s when uh Germaine joined he told me about it and said this does look a really interesting opportunity I met the folks there and I said yeah I’m I’m signing up for this but help us help you we need to build this type of a team we need this type of space we need beautiful whiteboards like you guys have here at uh we were admiring the whiteboards earlier like oh these are silky they’re really nice and so we need these tools we need screens we need our Post-it notes and we also need investment in our practice so that we can be successful and that’s why we joined so when we get into career regression um I didn’t know remember that that little diagonal slide where my career was progressing you know with an art degree I could never have predicted that 20 some years down the the road I would have gotten the same title my dad got my dad was a vice president in the engineering company strangely enough he was actually the chief of engineering and I remember growing up going to his office and back then they had like drafting tables and so people were were drawing mechanical parts and I saw my dad just kind of bearing down doing all this hard work manages managing this team but he just seemed so corporate and kind of out of touch with where I was as an artist that I never would have seen him as like a Guiding Light in my professional career and it turns out that when I got into management I was call my dad up all the time and then one day it just clicked what they are doing at these drafting tables is exact same thing we’re doing at computers we modeling experiences and we’re very conceptual about how we do it and very technical so then I realized oh I’m just like my dad it’s kind of strange how did that happened damn it I was trying to piss him off all his years and then I became him you know and I so he as a vice president as a vice president and I did not see that happening so what kind of made my career progress so this conversation is going to sound like it’s about me but I would like you guys as students and other audience members online maybe if you have like a notebook make take down these questions and ask yourself these questions because this part of self-awareness will help you actually progress um I do a lot of Career Mentoring and it’s a lot of it sounds like psychotherapy but it really is about understanding yourself um so you can under understand the world uh the world around you and how you can interact with it so the first part was was understanding my motivations coming from a design background as you print design and kind of an aesthetic background you think that the reason I was doing this because I just love design that doesn’t take you too far actually you need to love other things too what I realized is I loved mastering new skills I liked ux because it was a new skill set it gave me some new challenges and it allowed me to start at a very beginner level and see the challenge ahead of me and bear in like kind of Bear Down lean into it and master these skills little by little right because the process of ux is actually pretty cool you know it’s a really cool fascinating process I think that’s why you all are here are online you you know that there’s a lot there’s a lot of intrigue in this process the other was I knew for me personally I love teaching I used to teach at the University of Houston I taught prior to that I was always teaching drawing then I got into teaching Photoshop and web design and I just love teaching that’s one of the reasons I’m here talking to you all today I just really love it enjoy it and I want it to influence broadly because I get passionate about something I want to influence others into my passion it was true when I was a DJ it’s true as a pizza maker it’s true as a ux person creating a tribe is important to me too because when I want to get people interested in what I’m interested in you naturally create a community around you like with my pizza um Community it’s like more than a thousand people and some of it’s Global you know I have friends in Australia and England and Mexico who are Pizza makers as well who are we all kind of chat online so that was something that motivated me and it’s strange because I’m a bit of an introvert you don’t need to believe right now it’s fine but I am a bit of an introvert but connecting with people oneon-one is how you kind of build that tribe out growing others means a lot to me it’s something I’ve been doing throughout my career mentoring and growing others and then let’s be honest compensation mattered I told you earlier I couldn’t pay my rent so we do need to survive it is a job and the title mattered to me because we all human beings we all have egos and your title you know when you start out as a ux designer one you might go God I want to be a senior person because it’s going to make me feel better about myself how others perceive me how I feel about myself so let’s be honest about that it’s on the list it’s just not at the top of the list okay I want to pause for a second because my esteemed colleague is here is your mic hot yeah I I would love to hear Germaine’s kind of perspective as well on like what motivates here yeah it’s it’s pretty interesting to see your list because I think you know we all have our own motivations and it’s often different so like Robbie actually hired me he was the first person to give me a shot in ux design right so I started out as like a web designer very similar to ravie also this is very for old school old school people you know they didn’t have ux design early on it was all about web designers so a lot of my motivation came from I just really love interacting with teams of people and really working with people so for me like my number one motivation is actually being successful with the team of people and like having a goal and actually like knocking it out the park right that’s what really drives me um within my career and also was one of the reasons why I haven’t went the management path I have stayed more of the IC role because I actually really love doing the work and I had a very early experience of being a manager and I just didn’t like it it wasn’t something that motivated me so um so like for me my my main motivation like I said is working with the team actually being a part of that that energy of a group um you know being successful with the group is one of my main motivations and then I think you know Robbie has the the compet compensation and title um for me conversation is actually also important but title is not as important for me right so I’m somebody that’s like I’m about the team and I love being a part of the team so not not as high on my list um but it’s definitely important like we all need to get paid we all want to need to buy stuff for our kids and family and all that good stuff so it’s definitely important and then also like Robbie I really enjoy growing others and and working as a a mentoring people and helping people kind of grow their careers so mine is a little bit bit different and we’re all you know different with our motivations but to Robbie’s point it’s all about understanding yourself having that awareness so you can actually move the way that you need to move within your career um and you can’t really do that until you’ve kind of answered these these questions about motivations so um really really important thing to do and I think um even for me like looking back at that like oh what are my motivations now in this stage of my career so it’s like a one thing that you continue to do as you move through your career and progress so it’s funny uh you and I have had these conversations around moving into management for many years I know it’s conversation I’ve had with many of my team members because they feel that the only way to move up is to top out as a senior or principal designer and then get into management um let you don’t have to always choose a management I’m going to show you some other clear paths that will allow you to still have growth without getting into management you actually have an MBA I do yeah which is very strange it’s really you know uh doesn’t make sense for a youth designer really to have an NBA but for me is one thing that I really enjoy passion I have is to really be understand business right and as you kind of move up your your chain it’s really important to understand more business principles so for me as you know I like to grow and learn stuff I I thought like an NBA would be really good to kind of push me in a New Direction and kind of continue on with my learning path so yeah very strange for for for you know somebody in a ux ro to be a NBA but and you got me I’m an executive and I need an NBA so could I borrow yours do that it’s you know you would have thought that it would take an NBA to get to this role it’s not always the case um I think we are both proof that you can kind of spin your own path you can always do that so um stick around for maybe a few more slides here so um because I think this is like this slide especially is a interesting dialogue for the two of us um willingness to take opportunities so again we talk a bit about self-awareness one of the things that’s that drive drives us the most is fear and fear can drive you to inaction or action right can go either way actually so sometimes you’ll get an opportunity someone will tell you about a job and you go oh that sounds interesting but I don’t think I’m prepared for it that’s an opportunity there the doors open you might not feel prepared you might have the little impostor syndrome you might feel you need to learn a few more things and all that is is a bunch of excuses that your ego is telling you and it’s all driven by fear um but what I found for some reason I had the fear of missing out and failing and not taking opportunities so every time a door would open I would always walk through sometimes I walk back out but I’d always walk through and investigate and see what what that’s all about and that has served me very well I’m kind of curious about your experience on the opportunity side of things yeah this is this is a really great one um for me my safe space was actually working with Ry right so I worked with him for seven eight years two different companies and you know we we had a really good working relationship um but then you know it was like okay what am I actually going to do with my career um and one of the things that I really wanted to push myself is to kind of you know do this on my own right like he was the one that kind of helped me get where I was but I wanted to prove it to myself that I could do it my on my own so it was like you know leaving the the the house concept for me you know it’s like I I wanted to leave home and for me like I had this opportunity that came up and it was it gave me the opportunity to actually push myself in the into this you know uncomfortable space of being by myself and trying to figure out how to um bring ux ux along within this organization so I took the opportunity I did have to leave working with Robbie but you know it it was something that actually pushed me in my career gave me this great experience of being the ux of one in this organization where it was literally on me I had to figure out everything and kind of rooll the ux practice so it’s a great opportunity for me but I think it’s it’s really important to to kind of push yourself in especially in technology right um because you know the people that are the ones that grow in these roles are the ones that are willing to be uncomfortable and often times New Opportunities can feel extremely uncomfortable um so like in my mind like if you’re if you’re really someone that wants to grow and move uh throughout and progress your career like being okay with like taking these opportunities and being uncomfortable is like really important um and for me it’s it’s kind of got me to the place I am now is working at Google and when I tell people that everybody’s like why you work at Google and again it kind of plays into this idea of taking these opportunities that come along um and and being okay with being uncomfortable I mean you didn’t leave uh Pro go to Google you left Amazon go to Google that’s right that’s right so we had this conversation he’s like I don’t know should I do this I said it’s Google but wait a second but you’re at Amazon and you worked really hard to get here and maybe you shouldn’t just leave now because it might look like you’re not committed you know you you were at Amazon for how long about two and a half years yeah so that was right on the edge where I said it’s okay it’s okay it’s almost we’ll round up to three but if you’re if you’re leaving opportunities every six months you should have a conversation with yourself about that too you know that means you you’re having trouble committing and showing that and it does over time not look so good on your resume but it’s good that you left Pros because you’re working at pros and it was a comfortable position and you were killing it um and I had to support you on the way out you know um but we when you do that you also create an opportunity for someone else and look where you’re at now I I definitely like I super admire Germaine because uh I want to work at Google um so playing to my strength so this is interesting um if you’ve ever had conversations about strengths versus weaknesses some people get really they hold themselves back because they get too focused on where they’re weak avoid that think about your strengths the way that Batman thinks about all the things on his like tool belt and all those cool things he can do with his mind and his tools because he doesn’t have laser vision he can’t fly and nobody cares right that’s Superman you know so think about that kind of what makes up your super powers and lean into that and present yourself that’s part of your brand uh as you can see we have a working relationship we have a network I have a network with Zach and with Liz we have lots of friends in common and so if you’re a little scared about building your network because you’re not a people person or something like that well do it the way I do it um go to LinkedIn connect with people chat with them it’s so much easier than it was 25 years ago to connect with people on online and build your network there’s so many things you can do to do that um Google to get to Google I think you have a story around your network yeah um so basically the way the way I made it to Google was this point in itself right so I met somebody at a ux conference probably about 12 years now um me and him both were just ux designers at the time um chatted it up with them you know we did everything in this conference together it was like a weekl long conference we became kind of fast friends right um so during that conference you know exchang information kept in contact with each other over the years and then just so happened he was a manager at Google um he was looking he’s building his team and of course what do you do you look you look for people that you know that you you know you feel like you have um you know a relationship with and want to bring those people in you reached out to me and that’s how it got the Google so you know the short story the the the gist of the story is like this building networks you know building relationship with people it’s really important you never know how it’s going to play out over your career right I’m the this the main reason I made it to Google mean I live in Houston Google doesn’t really hire remote because of Co you know they open things up and now I was able to take advantage of the opportunity so um if it wasn’t for me just being who I am I love talking to people if I hadn’t to talk to him in this at this particular conference I probably wouldn’t be at Google right now so um it’s you know great story that kind of shows the importance of you know really making sure you’re building your your your network and I think really the cool thing about it is somebody that I was actually friends with right it wasn’t just because he knew me and he knew I could design or create stuff in figma it’s because we had a relationship so and we still have a relationship to this day so it’s a really important Point um there to to make sure you’re focusing on that yeah likewise uh my my good friend Germaine who was working for me at my previous company left I was a little heartbroken except for the fact that he brought me to the next company then he left again and here we are telling the story no it’s all good but so really like lean into this if you’re uncomfortable let me ask a just kind of show of hands who has a LinkedIn profile okay very good keep them up for a second um whose LinkedIn profile is complete and up to date you have endorsements skills maybe presentations you’ve posted in the last this year you’ve posted okay those things are really important so if someone ask questions about like how to get a job how do you interview we don’t look at resumes so much we look especially for designers we look at portfolios and we start at your LinkedIn LinkedIn is your business card okay LinkedIn is your business card so make sure it’s up to dat and um LinkedIn makes it easy they gamify it they tell you what percent your portf your your profile is complete and we’re in the world of AI it’s very easy to write a good profile nowadays just you know kind of word vomit a lot of stuff into chat GPT let it organize it for you paste it into your link to profile make sure you have a clear about statement there so I can figure out in disposition who you are amongst these other I’m going to say 250 candidates because that’s how many candidates we had appli just for a recent internship an internship 250 candidates so it’s really critical that you present yourself really well on LinkedIn and then have a strong portfolio what is a strong portfolio I don’t know go go search on Google what’s a strong portfolio for ux designer and go find you ex designer portfolios and try to emulate what you see your competition doing okay um think got two more points here we’ll move on to the actually after this slide I just want to pause and take some questions if we’ve got some um as you’ve heard I’ve talked a little bit about like psychology and self-awareness and you can look in the mirror and try to have a conversation with yourself and the only thing that’s going to prevent you from going very deep is your own ego that doesn’t want to be very honest with your yourself we we are a little fragile sometimes and we it’s hard to be honest with ourselves sometimes we want to feel good but to grow you got to deal with a bit of pain and it’s good to ask for your colleagues feedback I remember Germaine asked me for some feedback as he was prepping for an interview a few years ago and I kind of gave him feedback and that’s why you killed it you know because you’re open to the feedback open to um growing and taking it from someone you trusted so find people in your world who can give you feedback take that all of my one-on ones with all my team members have an agenda and in the agenda it says actively ask for feedback and I’m a manager I don’t like it being a one-way street so the next line says also give me feedback just be tact that’s all you know because the way you give feedback when you’re trying to um push somebody is different when from when you’re trying to give feedback back to advise somebody so when I give my boss feedback he’s Chief product officer I’m not trying to tell him how to do his job I’m not trying to Mentor him I’m trying to advise him tell him kind of what’s happening in the organization he might not be aware of and to give him just feedback in terms of blind spots he might not be aware of but he’s not my employee I’m not mentoring him but when a boss or someone senior to me is giving me feedback I want the mentoring I want the challenge so just think about how you give feedback and if you have trouble with feedback that is an important area to work on uh last Point here is about avoiding limiting beliefs um has everyone heard of fixed mindset versus growth mindset yeah some folks have this is really good so fixed mindset is when you’re comfortable and you kind of know what box you’re in it feels really comfortable that box and you don’t want to push outside of that because you have all the answers inside your box and you don’t need to look outside of the framework you have and what you already know a growth mindset starts with this premise that there’s opportunity to grow I might need to change the way I think I might need to get more information new information about the world and I’m G have to challenge my thinking maybe get uncomfortable and transform in some way being that new person sounds fantastic the process of getting there sucks right because you have to change and uh folks that have fixed mindsets tend to not be like innovators and if you’re a designer and you pride yourself on creativity you have to have a growth mindset because otherwise every new design problem that comes or design yeah problem that comes your way you tend to solve it the same way you did in the past because that’s going to guarantee results is those results won’t be optimal they won’t be optimal you’ve got to approach things in a different way each time so I would say fix versus growth mindset is something to Google Carol dwick is an author of a book on this dwy c k um definitely dive into the that into that a bit the other one around limiting beliefs is when people go I’m I’m super super tuned to this people go oh I could never do that oh I’m not good at that oh that looks really hard that is a a good indicator that someone is limiting themselves from changing growing trying something hard and that will guarantee if you’re junior designer today you’re going to stay a junior designer I mean I had one colleague I worked with 20 years ago and he’s still at that company and every five years he calls me up and he talks to me about career growth and he’s a lovely guy but that’s kind of where he’s fixed um I’ve seen folks like Germaine and many other folks I’ve worked with grow grow grow grow grow because they have that internal dialogue that says yeah I can do it it’s G to be hard but I can do it I’m gonna try that so just add one word to your sentence when you say oh I’m not good at that just say yet if you change that you’ve opened up your mind to taking those first steps to get better at it my first pizzas were terrible they’re edible because they’re pizza and they’re tasty still but they were like really terrible they’re embarrassing but I like looking back at those because they show me how much I grew I look I like looking back sometimes my portfolio to to show myself how he used to do it in 1998 and in 2005 and how we do it now um so keep track of that so ask yourself honestly what motivates yourself in your career these are the questions back to all of you what are your strengths or superpowers how can you Market yourself how can you lean into those Do You Believe In Your Potential do you believe in yourself or do you have limiting beliefs where do your limiting beliefs come from did people talk to you that way oh you oh you’re no good at that you can’t do that you know what happened did you embarrass yourself one time like get into that stuff and find out what what it is uh that’s driving that internal dialogue because you can’t have career growth all that career growth we talked about if you are holding yourself back when you had last as feedback have you built a healthy Network and did you take no opportunities or do you talk yourself out of them and I these things are here because I’ve seen this with hundreds of people I’ve mentored over the last 15 years right so can we pause here for a second I want to see if there’s any question online or questions from the audience that we could take yes Quinn hello I’m Quinn um my question is this is for both of you guys is there something that you wish you would have done at the beginning of your ux career wow um so it’s it’s a tough answer uh because when I started ux was I don’t know did it exist I don’t know it exist in Silicon Valley so we didn’t really usability didn’t even call it it’s a very weird and different time than what it is now um so I think my answer kind of goes back to um I think it really goes back to like really understanding some of the methods a little bit better um like I learned on the job mainly because this guy um but I didn’t know anything other than like I to make a goodlook website you know what I mean like I didn’t have this the the knowledge of ux I was wasn’t really I didn’t really have the experience of doing a lot of the stuff and like going through the process of doing research before I actually had to do it without him so um for me like it was really about the knowledge and the skills I wish I would have had more ability to actually learn what the what ux actually is and not actually learn on the job and I know that’s kind of a I feel like I’m punting a bit on the answer but it it really is kind of more tied to like how I came into the into the career so I don’t know if Rob something better well I have something different I’m sure um so ask the question one more time so I can really dial into it is there something that you wish you would have done at the beginning of your ux career yeah trying not to give a half hour answer on this one because there’s so many things guys there’s so many things um one I one thing I just want to set one kind of premise that’s different I went to art school so it’s different so I didn’t have projects group projects were kind of I learned skills that would have helped me in my corporate career so early part of my career I needed to learn project management I need to learn estimates figure out how to scope things how to work with others be comfortable presenting so I didn’t have those basic skills I worked in a studio you know for kind of for myself it was very different so putting that aside for a second um the the number one thing that I I look back at throughout most of my career is that I wish I had built relationships better and ux people falsely credit themselves for being empathetic yes yeah yeah um right so I mean I interviewed just someone just yesterday who by the way got the job so congratulations to them amazing I think they’ll find out later today I hope they’re not watching um so amazing so the thing is um people when you when you ask them what’s what’s a core characteristic of ux people they say empathy and they usually get a glow when they say that you know what I’m saying they like credit themselves for being empathetic and being able to put themselves in other people’s shoes but 99% of the time they’re not really doing it we are basically saying we’re imagining what it might be like to be the stick figure in our mind that’s behind a computer clicking through our screens so that’s one of the reasons we do research right to get really close to them and see a person observe a person which starts to make you empathize more and more and more and we get pretty good at that we do our personas which then starts to pull us away from the the actual individual person again um and then we give requirements and it pulls us away even more the place where we lack empathy I hate to say this is with our colleagues I sometimes see ux people compete with each other a bit or get you know a little hurt about something I see ux people and product managers and Engineers struggle with each other and you know have competing agendas instead of seeing that you’re all part of one team and I see that they we lack that empathy because we’re judgmental we bring our ego into the picture and as much as we have to Pat ourselves in the back for being empathetic to our end users and advocating for end users we have to start at home damn it get have to start at home so I a vice president today and I will tell you something that I feel like I held myself back for many many years because early in my career I always felt frustrated by managers directors and Executives who didn’t get it they didn’t get what we all know here they didn’t get it and so I would kind of demonize them in my mind and blame them for not letting us do what we knew was right because I didn’t empathize with what their job was they’re actually making sure that the business is running so we can have salaries should be very grateful for that and what does it take to do that there’s a great book called the leadership pipeline you could probably even find a summary if you don’t to read the whole thick book it’s amazing book uh and one of my bosses gave that to me when I joined Pros actually because he wanted me to be very clear what the job of a director was versus a manager I was a manager prior then a director versus a vice president versus a chief officer it’s important a thing to empathize with your Executives so that you could figure out later how to talk to them and I wish I had learned that earlier on because I hel myself back because I talk like a ux nerd you know I was always talking about all the proofs and here’s what the the research said and let me walk you through all these steps and pull you guys from up here way down into our weeds it’s a great way to alienate people you know is to pull them down into your weeds so if you’re going to present to folks like I care a lot from talking to students today and I want to talk to you in a way that’s kind and empathetic that’s helpful for you so we can have some real engagement so I want you to think about that word empathy a lot and having empathy for your I’m going to say brother and sisters that you work with you know and also you work with here uh because when you have that like when it’s coming from a place of love then you can start to really put yourselves into their position and recognize that chief officer carries a lot of Burden don’t demonize them try to understand them and then connect your language of design into a way that connects to them so they go oh now I care about design because I understand how this drives our business value tolda is gonna be a long answer oh can I add please soft skills oh my God you ex designer you your soft skills are so important for Success right so understanding how to work with other people do you have self-awareness some of the stuff Robbie talked about there you really it’s hard to know you need that stuff before you get into the role but the more you can understand like dynamics of working with team members and things like that it’s it’s it’s really important um because oftentimes as a IC ux designer you have no power so you have to influence you have to use um a lot of different ways of getting people to be on board with what you’re what you’re selling so soft skills are really important for sure yeah I didn’t have any I mean in the interviews this is very true if you if you get an interview with me or anyone on my team you’re already qualified I rarely look at portfolios or talk about your resume in an interview the last thing I want to do is talk about X in an interview is that weird it’s because I’m trying to figure out how you work with teams um do you take feedback well are you coachable do you have potential I don’t need Superstars I already have Superstars I want to grow superstars on my team so it’s a lot about your personality and do we want to work with you you know have you developed those soft skills over the years or do you have a chip on your shoulder you know are you trying to prove something to me you know we’re really assessing your professionalism and your ability to build relationships yeah another question before we move on yeah please hi uh so related to the career uh building and grow up there’s this question that says that what you guys think are the real reasons why some folks have a rough time having like lending into ux jobs and positions one time why do we think that’s the some people have like difficult time lending into time yeah ux kind of jobs I I’ll let uh Jermaine uh take this one actually you’ve been in more interviews in the last decade than I have so yeah I’m kind of curious what your experience is and what you think least yeah yeah I mean you so you’re you’re asking why do people now have a hard time getting into ux I honestly think a lot of it just had to do with the the market the job market right now right so after covid most of companies over hired right and so now we’re in this kind of very weird space for ux um and so I think it’s another thing that you have to really take in consideration is the cycles of of of of Industry right so um you know there’s web 1.0 Web 2.0 and these Cycles they change right so at at certain points the job market is really good certain points it gets bad so it’s some of that also right we’re just kind of in that situation now where you know companies aren’t investing as much they’re not hiring as much so you it just it’s harder to get in right so you have these multiple things happening um that’s kind of creating this this the space that we’re in um so you have to be conscious of that I think it’s really important because I mean what can you really do about these larger things happening right it’s not much we can do about it we have to just understand the situation so we can figure out what we need to do um but outside of that I think too one of the the bigger problems that we face as a as a ux industry and like how we’ve sold ourselves over the years I think it’s kind of affecting us right so now companies since they’re pulling back and not spending as much money they feel like you know ux isn’t as important so again all these things are kind of playing into it um so in my opinion I think you know it’s it’s multiple factors that that you that we’re dealing with right now and then you know these companies are just laying off tons of people um so that it’s a lot of people out there that’s looking for jobs so just feels like it’s a lot of things just laying on top of each other that’s creating a currentc situation um I think you know the the key is to try to stay positive within it all and you know I think that some of the points Rober made about networking um I think if you can put yourself in situations where you’re actually um you know able to meet people face to face um those are maybe the some couple strategies kind of help in the situation but um like I said I think it’s a lot of different things that are causing the kind of crazy Market at at the current point right now so yeah I I agree um there is also more ux Talent out there than I’ve ever seen like uh you know people going through programs like this and many other programs so there’s a lot of competition out there so one thing to consider and I think we can get into the next part of this presentation you might thought we were done sorry guys we got to keep talking some more we have some more topics to talk about because we got what’s eye shape versus t-shape let’s talk about that a second um but it may help to consider some of your adjacencies because if I’ve got a ux designer who also has a product uh uh product management C certification project man management certification do some engineering brings that knowledge into the ux role they’re much more interesting to me but I don’t want them to do all those things but knowing that they have that experience tells me that they can probably interact better with their colleagues with and and work as a successful product team together yeah so look at your adjacencies too so what doesn’t work in developing kind of your career is just talking about Career Development like we’re doing today and not taking any action so I Mentor a lot of people and I can tell you the ones immediately that are going to do well and the ones that aren’t okay when I’m mentoring someone’s taking notes I already know they’re going do well right because at a minimum they know it the information getting is valuable in addition to that they’re telling me that it’s important to them right so just that act of taking notes when you are with somebody watch everyone start taking notes right now but when when you’re with someone who’s trying to help you is incredibly uh important indicator that they’re going to do well because it kind of starts with that like taking the value in capturing it and then the next step is some follow through so most of those folks who I can tell they’re generally a bit type A or they they take their the career development very seriously they then follow up with an email and or they’ll ask could I meet with you again so all right there already right there they’re taking an action right on that um so we haven’t gotten into them applying for a job or updating their resume just simple thing of taking notes and doing a followup with me that means they’re going to keep doing those kinds of follow-ups so you know a house was built Brick by Brick and and like think of it that way what are all the little baby steps I can take that if I do them regularly you’ll have an amazing career ahead of you um and there’s so many things you could do for follow through so I just touched on one really that just the taking notes and then taking some action when you know you need to work on your resume go work on your resume I’m uh mentoring somebody right now and gave them some tips on how to improve their resume asked him for a copy of their resume I took him to chat GPT helped rewrite it a bit put it into a new template format send it back to to them so I did work on their behalf now if they don’t take a the next step and apply for jobs update their LinkedIn like I suggested and all that then they’re not going to move forward so you guys have to take responsibility for your own growth so it’s uncomfortable I get it you have to lean into it any growth is uncomfortable because you’ve got to go through some pain to then grow going to the gym it’s not comfortable it’s not comfortable it hurts and you need to rest afterwards too that’s part of it as well give her some time to rest and and and take in the growth and not just burn out okay all right finding your voice so we’re gonna get into like this the LA the last kind of part of the presentation we’re okay on time yeah cool all right so I like it being more interactive otherwise you always fall asleep on me and I’m talking to myself again so uh finding your voice so when you’re starting your career you really don’t have any expertise you’re just kind of familiar prior to stepping in to college and choosing a career path you just had familiarity around this area maybe some basic skills but you start to go up the ranks up this ladder climbing as you develop more and more skills get into seniority uh perhaps be some become some type of a leader it could be a principal that type of a leader you know or it could be like a manager type of a leader but some type of leader and as you do that you kind of find your voice because when you start out you’re a very tactical thinker you could talk to other designers about design about information architecture about development and all that but as you go up you start to think very strategically what you talk about what you care about how you talk to others who you can talk to starts changing when I started I had no experience public speaking other than speaking to my students and that was comfortable while I went to the corporate environment I was just terrified but I could talk with my team members because we could talk about CSS and HTML and pixel pushing and all that that was easy go to lunch and talk about that but when I had to talk to an audience at work I just got really nervous and side rightfully so but along the way you will develop your voice and I put this out there because you should go easy on yourself and recognize it is a process and you should look forward to failing only so you can learn from that and not repeat your failures over and over and over um you need to Market yourself as a ux person because if you don’t you become invisible so I sure that in your classwork you know Project work you have to present to others and that’s probably the most comfortable thing to do even though it is uncomfortable but imagine a presenting to an audience at work and you’ve got B your boss there maybe some of his peers that’s pretty uncomfortable now if you just talk like a designer to other designers you’re going to alienate them so when you think about these different audiences these are all very distinct audiences there’s different types of forums to talk to them in each Forum even if you’re talking about the same thing you have to adjust your dialogue okay so imagine I’m going to share with you a couple different forms and ways to talk to these different audiences imagine you’re just talking about the same thing every time how would you adjust your dialogue to each of them so with executive reviews I was in executive reviews this entire week I got eight minutes to talk to the CEO and all other Chief officers that was it eight minutes it was a really busy week we had 20 hours of reviews eight hours two days four hours the next day was a lot of content they were taken in how can I speak strategically to them so I sound relevant was going to be very differently than how I speak to our team completely differently so talk about strategy boil down the work you do and say does this matter holy crap I can’t find a way to make this relevant to the CEO is does my job my work have any meaning you should ask that question or am I thinking about this the wrong way and should I maybe not take the opportunity to talk to the CEO or some chief officer or a vice president because all I’m going to do is make an impression that I don’t know how to connect right so really be careful figure out also when not to talk if you’re gonna talk to the product team talk about your research insights you get from the research so the product managers can make really good decisions right or business analysts they can make good decisions and do your design reviews you’re going to look at screens you’re going to look at the design you might look at iterations and you could talk more in design language there but connect to product strategy not to business strategy but like the product strategy okay uxt meetings um we’ve been on teams together for years and lot of knowledge sharing culture building sometimes you don’t talk about ux we show uh slideshows of our latest vacation because what we’re trying to do there is connect with other designers you don’t have to talk about Des to death you can talk you can use that to relationship build and sometimes like Jermaine you went to a conference once I remember you came back and gave her presentation to the whole team for half an hour of what you learned so those kinds of opportunities are there as well and project work and all that totally cool um engineering sessions so when you’re working with developers talk about your design but maybe talk about design system because they can take the design system and translate that into components that they can use now you’re making it meaningful to that audience accessibility because usually we are the ones Champion accessibility not engineers and like get more techy with them and meet them where they’re at again don’t alienate people when you’re talking to these audiences uh customer engagement is different so when you’re talking to customers you really don’t want to talk from the inside out you want to talk about like things that matter to them outside of your company talk about research studies that will matter to them not all of them the ones that matter to them uh maybe the road map so they know what to look forward to try to pull them into your methodology talk about methodology but pull them in and try to get feedback from them it’s a very different dialogue than what we’re having with our Executives and then everyone else in the world you could do newsletters you could do videos we have social media we have a send ux Instagram podcast blog I post on LinkedIn a lot and that’s to a general audience part of it’s because I want the general audience to maybe consider working on our team one day and understand our culture and understand how sophisticated we are even for a small company with under two 20 ux researchers and designers that were so sophisticated you might want to join us might have a lot to learn as well so makes sense now when I break it down right like finding your voice at the level you’re at and tailoring your conversation to the audience you’re talking to super super important otherwise audience falls asleep and that is not good for your own morale everyone’s awake yeah pH it’s do going really well um challenges is finding your voice um there is a number of different challenges I might not kind of go through all of these because you can read them I think you’re going to relate to them but you know we talked a lot about self-awareness that’s also um connected to self-confidence managing fear these kinds of things are very much in the kind of psychology therapy type of world of you know how to you improve yourself um psychologically I would say you know your inner dialogue um self-confidence the worst thing someone can tell you is you need to be more confident what does that do it makes you less confident right immediately so uh confidence comes with success so just do the work you need to do gain more and more successes more and more successes then you get more confident I was like that with public speaking I was just terrified like my body was just feeling it and I would work myself into a lot of fear when I was uh public speaking many years ago but after being thrown to the Wolves many times I got better at it because I survived each time and then people would say you know you’re a really good public speaker I was like no I’ll accept that and the next time I go speak I’ll just remember that they said that so the confidence came from the successes knowing your audience when to speak when not to speak creating an opportunity for yourself to speak um Zach and Liz asked me to speak today and I said yes it wasn’t very difficult just said yes to it because every audience if you guys want me then I i’ love to talk to y’all uh taking feedback accepting failure celebrating success we talked about all these except for celebrating success so when you do have a success tell others about it tell your parents my mom is in her 70s I tell still tell her we’re to have a success because it makes me feel good I was a child at one point it’s okay to you know have your parents feel proud for you right do you do that too oh yeah yeah sure how do you celebrate your success when you get a new job um I’ve been Theus so it’s kind of calmed down over the years but no I I mean you know go out to eat you know do a little party maybe if it depends on you you know going to Google you maybe do a little bit more so it’s like you know it just like you said just you know go out have a good time and then enjoy the the the the the experience right because you don’t get many of them unless you’re someone like me that’s had a few but um you know it’s just really you know take advantage of because you create those memories so yeah um I always tell people when I Pro when I give a promotion I always say go out to dinner take your significant other have a glass of wine have some champagne like live a little you know this is your moment um and treat that as a milestone um so you don’t feel like you’re always just working to something just pause for a second and give yourself uh uh kind of a hug in a sense uh this idea of imposter syndrome is universal it has nothing to do with intrinsic like demographics men have imposter syndrome not just women you know nobody can claim that we have imposter syndrome more than other Chief officers have imposter syndrome I know because I work with them and they they will admit that they’re human beings um doesn’t matter your your race or your background I mean there’s like Oprah Ry probably still has imposter syndrome because of her really difficult childhood so don’t let that hold you back that goes back to limiting beliefs okay no excuses with impostor syndrome guys let it go I have imposture syndrome right now does that make you feel better okay good we’re over it now so finding your voice so you looked at this totem earlier it’s in the shape of an eye and it’s really your expertise developing in one domain and a few years ago I had a colleague of mine who I asked I said like how did you get to this level where you’re now an executive and you’re a consultant you’re working for centry you’re just kicking butt you’re like really killing it because I just feel like I’m stuck how did you do it she said she was actually one of my first mentors in ux and uh she said you got to start working outside of domain and get expertise in other areas and work across the business otherwise you typ cast yourself you are the ux guy period so what that means is when you get to a certain level of seniority I wouldn’t necessarily do this when you’re junior unless you really don’t want know what you want to do yet but usually like uh you did development design ux kind of in the early stages right little bit of product little bit of product in the early stages but you figured out no ux is my my my passion so you went up to a senior level in ux principal principal now principal level so but my point is you kind of went up right after you figured out like what you like and then you’ve always told me that you’re interested in product so that’s an adjacency that you can get into yeah yeah definitely it’s U again understanding those passions what I enjoy and also how helps me as a ux designer so yeah yeah and you can do this again like I worked in a marketing department I worked in instructional Computing in the beginning of my career then into a web design Department then into a marketing department then into an ID it department and while I was a designer I was still working in these different functions and I learned a lot about each of those functions um and then you can sometimes do that and then move up so you might start in training and then get into content strategy and then get to ux there’s a guy who did that got on our team that way um there’s another guy who on our team started engineering development from many years he always told me I want to be on your team one day he’s on my team now and he’s a senior designer it’s pretty amazing so that’s one thing don’t be scared of these adjacencies consider that that and then even consider taking a step back going to a new domain maybe you’re manager oh I had somebody who’s done this senior yeah I think the developer is like a senior or lead developer and he took a step back to be a designer to we have designer one two senior lead took a step back to regrow his career in the ux area it’s amazing so don’t be scared of that at Pros I see people do this all the time move across different departments not because they don’t know what they want to do it’s because they do want to keep growing so do like do that for yourself and you can keep expanding out this way so what that looks like is all these different types of departments in an organization in your skill set working across that and that’s what we mean by t-shaped you’re like wow Robbie took a long time to get to t-shaped that’s what I was here for um it is really really good advice you don’t have to rush into it but expose yourself to that and realize that there’s no way to get to the top of your career especially into executive roles or Consulting roles without getting more t-shaped I’m going to pause there take some more questions and then we’ll move into the kind of final era yes sir good to see you again oh yeah CL off this was a great experience so yeah good to see you again um I just wanted to get um kind of like a anecdote or personal experience from both of you guys where you stepped out into the deep end and did something you were like you guys were talking about being uncomfortable and kind of growing from that so I wanted to get a little bit of a personal experience from you guys uh time when you did that and where you grew as a designer and as a ux professional can I go you guys are comfortable sharing that I’ll give you some time on this this is so easy for me so easy for me um I was maybe two three years out of college remember Master’s painting okay basically hippie artist okay three years later I’m working in an oil gas company making more money than I ever expected anyone could ever pay me it was very strange and I was doing actually in addition to my design work doing development work I was building portals on infrastructure that i’ never seen in my life before it’s very very technical work and I uh as a matter of record had the title you can laugh at this if you like um it architect it is hilarious because I know what an architect really does so in in that because I was architecting these uh these web portals the company I worked at was a multinational company and they had uh organizations in Brazil Australia Europe all over and we need to build this infrastructure um that will allow for us all to be on the same network the same the same basically like an internet and I learned how to build those portals but it was really technical super buggy very complex and then one day my boss said rvi need you to go down to Brazil two weeks and train the team down there on how to build their portal their English is so so and I’m thinking yeah my technical experience is so so this is not going to go well and I had like an IBM laptop at the time and that was buggy so I took a second one with me and I I was really nervous because I had to build a whole syllabus for this to help teach them how to how to do this work so I go to the airport I’m in the parking lot parking my car and I cried my eyes out I was so nervous I said this is going to go horribly wrong they’re going to find out I’m an impostor now you know this is going to fail my computer’s not working and I share that with you to say when you make it to a certain level you still have emotions you still have anxiety it’s okay to be vulnerable about vulnerable about it and I just want you to know that you may hit a point where you have that important interview the next morning you’re freaking out a little bit about it calm your nervous system down let it out if you need to let it down because let it out because that actually lets it out you don’t carry it in you and try to act tough and then go do the job and it wasn’t spectacular kind of made it through we had a lot of buggy stuff and I I made friends there who helped carry the knowledge transfer through and nothing bad happened nothing bad at all happened i’ just like to tell that story about how I was crying in the parking lot because it’s so visual and so embarrassing but it’s true it’s it’s okay um so mine is actually pretty recent last year um I had to run a design Sprint uh I work for Google Cloud um and we were uh in a space where we were working on the vision of our product for the next five years or whatever um so I had to run this design Sprint and these were like all like so they’re l7s these are equates to like somebody like Robbie in the room right um and I never met any of these people right I live in Houston all these folks there in Silicon Valley um so I had to fly out and you know didn’t know any of these folks I had to run this design Sprint um and it was really terrifying kind of like what Robie is talking about because these are like not people that I work with these are all higher ups right um so it’s a pretty terrifying experience um you know because you just don’t know you know how is it going to be somebody in the room that’s you know working against you all those dynamics that come up in those situations um Google is a very interesting place culturally to work um you know people are extremely smart there’s probably some PhD dude in this design Sprint that I’m working with you know so it’s just like very intimidating experience um but you know it’s kind of very similar to what Robbie said is just like putting yourself in a situation I think preparation is always like the the best thing to kind of ease your fears in some of these situations making sure that you’re like really prepared and practic and that’s something that I have to do personally because I I can tend to you know go off into you know tangents and stuff like that so making sure that I’m like really really really well prepared for the situation it’s usually how I ease my fears um but literally just throwing yourself in there you know making sure you’re ready to go and you know kind of being Fearless in a way right it’s like you you just got to like I’m gonna I’m gonna make this happen you know just having that attitude and that spirit I think is really important in these situations because like Robbie said it’s it’s so many times in all all your career that you’ll see that you’re doing something that you just never done before right so it’s like this this new ground that you’re pushing into and understanding that situation is like okay yeah I’m going to have some it’s probably going to be a little parts of it but I’m going to get through it right so it’s like um I think that’s the most important thing is just like having confidence in yourself and just like making it happen but um so I went through the Sprint it was a three-day Sprint um we actually got some really good stuff down that we’re actually working on now to actually hit the road map um so it’s it was quite successful right but it was just a pretty terrifying experience that I just pushed myself through so I think that’s the the you know good story there for for that I’m kind of curious in the audience it’s not like you guys haven’t been through these kinds of challenges where you’re nervous and anxious does anyone have something that they do to prepare themselves when they’re very anxious about you know some challenge it might be I don’t know could be getting to a certain college or could be getting a job or could be some conversation that at what do you do to kind of calm yourself down or to prepare yourself oh we have the mic coming here sorry M yeah yeah for let pass it around so this is something I learned in high school was I do something physically to help me mentally so I get I have I get anxious whenever I’m having a talk in front of people or meeting a whole new group of people so I try to stand or like I learned she was like just do like a superwoman pose and then you feel better and then I started doing that and then I noticed I did feel more confident or that I mean that can be interpreted in different ways so people can do different things that work for them but that’s helped me in multiple instances where I’m like oh my gosh like I’m anxious about this and then I start put like this or just physically doing something and then I feel so much better that’s great that’s something that’s that’s what works for me and that does work relatively universally is a psychophysiological response right so I had a team member uh who had a background in acting and he’s now a manager of research he’s up in Seattle and he saw how terrified I was about five years ago of giving this presentation that turned out to be an incredible success and he gave me some acting techniques uh warm-up exercises uh that helped me just relax my body and so I learned before giving a presentation that I get nervous about to do something even if it’s not those techniques to use something to like move my body or warm my body today we got to interact with folks just before giving the presentation we didn’t walk in cold and start giving a presentation and that that relationship feeling comfortable moving our bodies walking around we did uh was it three flights of stairs to go get a bottle of water you know these things help a a bit um and they help distract you and stuff so what you describe there many forms of that very real have a do something physical that will relax your mind you had I think a thought as well what do you do to kind of relax yourself or man or or manage your anxiety or prepare so I think for me it kind of I have to just pretend that in the audience is like my mom cuz like if I see like thousands of my mom it relaxes me to like it’s just like a normal conversation between me and her and so it’s like I know for our ux2 class we have to present a lot so I just like honestly all those people are my mom so I’m just like it’s just like it makes me comfortable because if not then I’m going to get anxiety I’m going to sit there and I’m going to start shaking and it’s like my skills over the time like especially in ux2 have gotten better with presenting because I I’m up there in front of everybody but it was like I was just really nervous and my mom I talked to my mom about it literally when I left the first time she was like why don’t like it’s always that old saying of like why don’t you pretend like everyone’s in their underwear or something like that and she was like why don’t you just pretend it’s just me sitting there and we’re just interacting and I was like okay so also too with our professor she sits right here in the front row and it’s kind of like a mom figure yeah kind of cuz she’s the mom of our ux so I’m like looking at her and I’m like she’s like nodding her head and I’m like okay I got it I got it I got it so it’s just imagining my mom is here and it’s just a normal conversation between me and her and that’s it I think it’s wonderful and you know it’s a valid techniques technique because it works it doesn’t matter you can manage imagine like I’m imagining you all are frogs right now and it helps me no I’m not that’s so weird um but whatever technique works it’s valid so I think it’s great anyone else have something you want to share Quinn yeah about um again it’s not always about anxiety but like what do to prepare for something you know is going to be a challenge um I like to remind myself that people love me um so when we’re nervous about either presenting or when we do something new or we’re meeting new people we’re meeting maybe people in the corporate world and we’re students right um I think the assumption is that okay I’m going to messed up I’m going to do horrible and they going to think I’m awful and they hate me and I like try to change that belief is that like okay these people already love me they already like me makes me more comfortable to be myself like um you have to give people the chance to like you right yeah I like that that’s pretty cool huh I like that yeah anyone else want to share oh Zach we got one from Zach cool so most of yall have heard me speak at some point in time throughout the last several years um and every time I get up there I do always have this you know this kind of very nervous energy when I get up and I speak um and for me it’s not that I can do something to calm myself down beforehand it’s that I can do something in the moment that helps give that energy someplace to go um I know that when I get nervous I speak very quickly um so what I traditionally do and how you can tell I wasn’t ready to speak today is I have something in my pocket and it could be something as simple as a rock or a fidget or something and I can just play with it between my fingers so most talks I do that you’ll see I’ll have my hand in my pocket I’m just kind of messing with something in there and that gives that energy someplace to go and gives all that extra Place extra energy somewhere that that can focus on so that the rest of my brain can focus on actually speaking Yeah I love that and the more we do these things the more successes we will have because absolutely right because you’re in a more centered place now if it doesn’t work out doesn’t work out uh be cautious what stories you tell yourself right that’s why I mentioned earlier when I have I have multiple jobs open right now I I’ve done interviews throughout this week while we’re also doing our business reviews there’s a lot going on in the world and those jobs have minimum 150 applicants per role right sometimes over 300 depends on the job so if you don’t get the job and you have repair you know you’re good negative selft talk doesn’t make anything better just say well uh there must have been some Factor uh it must have been a great field there’s another one around the corner for me don’t take it personally I can probably reach out and ask for some feedback I got Robbie’s email I got the whoever the hiring manager’s email is I could ask for some feedback but don’t take it too personally right be cautious of the stories you tell yourself and both overly optimistic and overly negative just kind of be in the present as much as you can but be be cautious of that because I mean actors especially right they get rejected left and right until they get that one opportunity and now they’re doing bit parts for 10 more years until they get that one opportunity and then we just know the ones are successes and that’s why a lot of people get into this because they think oh I’ll be a success one day well good Lord football players baseball players I mean like less than what a tenth of a percent of people who go into that become professionals so you have to be comfortable with that and not take it personally doesn’t mean you’re not great okay sometimes you can also remix yourself like I got um out of Art and I re invented my own career before user experience was even a domain and before I was a DJ and I was already remixing this is crazy okay so so that’s possible too so think in a very broad kind of plastic way in that sense right all right so we’re kind of getting to the yeah last half hour or so um I want to get into some practical things and um maybe before I do that any other QA online um yeah I see the one about AI maybe let’s hold that one for a second until the end and uh I would really love to get um two of us might have an interesting dialogue in AI but I think uh any questions about where we are so far in the talk no good how you doing good see you I’m familiar faces here it’s very nice cool all right let’s go into it so uh again take some notes maybe I can work with Liz and send some pointers out after I hadn’t really planned to do that but it’s probably a good idea to take some of the big tips out of the deck and share it with you um but you’re also welcome to take notes right now so these things I’m going to put on this slide are literally what I’ve done with my team members over the years I’ve got proof here he will substantiate this and he’s a Google so you might want to like pay attention Okay so this is very interesting when I became a manager and I wanted to help develop people I realized that my team members joined my team by reading a job description doing an interview and then knowing what job they needed to do and every year we would do an assessment of how they did that year and that determine whether they get promotion or have a salary increase and all that but it’s all codified these are the skills you need as a ux person these are the tools you may use and here’s the extras you can take those and put them into like a spreadsheet and rate yourself on all those things and you can assess yourself and you can even have somebody else assess you if you want and not all these have to be ux skills it could be things like photography video editing you don’t know when these show up my head shot was was taken by uh one of my team members like five years ago and actually my had shots is a selfie but um but the point is that team member also did a lot of video editing on our team as well so think broadly Beyond just what you consider ux project Management’s one I don’t know if you have some skills development skills um think yeah the project management is really important in product right type of product bring into your role marketing depends maybe brand development illustration we had someone on our team who’s a great illustrator engineering too so important right you work with engine so if you can like talk their language right it creates a connection with these people because you can speak their language because um you know they often are different than us yeah but we love them and we hope they love us so um really think about think broadly about all the skills for example usability testing is a skill uh or and tools uh mirro is a tool you use or figma is a tool you use think about both of those also pen and paper paper is also a tool so think about all those very broadly skills could also be facilitating design sessions um do that you can create your own personal spreadsheet maybe this could be a class assignment where you create your own skills assessment I don’t know I don’t know give you that one for free um and I’m going to show you some slides uh that are screenshots of the one we used to do then you take that and you go well I’m kind of have no experience in prototyping I’m okay at graph design I’m really really good at doing research and you rate yourself one two three four whatever skill you want to use and then you go o these areas that are kind of weak I want to make strong and these other ones that are strong I want to become an expert in and you turn that into a development plan you go oh there’s this project coming up and I can literally do that or I have no portfolio pieces let me go find a company that has a s that’s terrible I’ll ask them if I could do a free job for them and do build a portfolio piece out of that so get clever there’s no excuses is 2024 AI can help you with this it’s just a matter if you have the drive to do it and then you take that you line it to your career plan so career plan is something that’s let’s say one three five years down the road after five years frankly the world’s going to change so much I wouldn’t worry about projecting too much further okay excuse me um and that career plan can be inside let’s say your current call it a company it might be actually your educational career plan right now I know I want to get a masters in HFI or or human factors right sorry um I know that I want to get a PhD in research so that’s fine that’s your one to fiveyear plan you can develop that and think about milestones and goals but also think about in terms of your skill set what’s the point in getting better at photography when you need to get better at uh data analysis you know or data analytics because you actually want to be a PhD in that area so be very literal about this okay align this to business strategy so when you’re in a company and you’re bu developing a career plan so that’s where a lot of people are kind of online right now developing a career plan think about where your business is going our businesses are deep into AI so you should think about how AI factors into the work you do as a designer as a product uh marketer as a product manager whatever it happens to be you should incorporate that in because AI is not going away it’s not a fad guys right it’s like the web people used to think oh the webs like a fad no that’s silly like we’re constantly evolving as a civilization these things are not going away so think about your business strategy how it’s pivoting and make your plan relevant to where the business is going or the business you want to go to is going okay makes sense I know it’s a little conceptual but these will turn into documents if you have a challenge with that call me up I’ll help you and then find a mentor or a sponsor I didn’t say or I said and that’s what’s on the slide and and there’s a reason it’s and because they have two different jobs a mentor can be a teacher sometimes a mentor can be a boss but not don’t don’t count on it necessarily uh but a mentor is a mentor a mentor is like a coach and what they’re going to help you do usually within a fixed time frame understand where you’re at where you want to get and have some type of conversation or relationship with you to nudge you down that path you need to show your Mentor that you’re not just there listening for three or six months that you’re actually doing some work because it’s a relationship and you’re actually in the driver’s seat not the mentor boss relationship to boss is in the driver’s seat because they delegate they dictate in some ways they kind of align you to the business the mentor it’s the opposite uh my mentees schedule the meetings with me they accommodate me they’re the one that take notes they’re the ones that prepare because my job is to give them the best of me to bring my knowledge to them to care um to think deeply about stuff and sometimes to connect them with other resources which could be people or information or books or things like that out there a mentor is incredibly important for your development right now most your mentors have probably been your teachers but when you get out of the work sorry the school environment your mentors are going to be people who are on LinkedIn who have profiles you can reach out to you know I reach out to a few just this past week I’m trying to build some new relationships to help me with my continued Career Development all right do anyone know what a sponsor is versus a mentor over here can we pass a mic over here please a sponsor is someone that’s going to advocate for your career growth Behind Closed does so that would probably look like somewhere that’s two levels above you so not your manager boss but like a director um they’re the ones saying yeah this person needs a raise or this person needs a to move up their to a senior role that would be a sponsor that’s killer definition I don’t think I could have stated that better yeah killer definition um nothing to add to that that’s perfect except it’s important to have a sponsor because if you want to do big stuff no no that’s all your thunder it’s not mine yeah yeah that’s not my that’s all your thought that’s great I you should really like understand that because when you are frustrated that things doors aren’t opening for you you don’t necessarily need a mentor you need a sponsor need someone who’s going to advocate for you and open the door and it is behind closed doors which is amazing if you feel like your career development isn’t happening it’s because those decisions are made behind closed doors if you don’t have good relationships it’ be kind of a jerk sometimes people will recognize that right but if you’re killing it people recognize that too and they will talk about that behind closed doors but Germaine is seeing that I’ve advocated for certain things for our ux programs and in some companies when we didn’t have a sponsor it couldn’t it just simply couldn’t happen and I’ve had many bosses even as a manager and direct director up to VP had many many bosses depending on the boss may or may not have a sponsor sometimes it has to be the person above your boss and you have to handle that delicately so it doesn’t look like you’re going around someone and that’s where the soft skills really matter a lot sponsors will open doors for you it’s amazing it’s unbelievable but be very clear about what the differences between a mentor it’s more like your coach they will help you more in real time they’ll help you get better during the season like a football coach right they’ll help you get better during that season and they’re very kind of time boxed in a sense um a sponsor who can help you in your career level up a boss has very different responsibilities um and then you have your colleagues and stuff so just be clear about these different roles we talked about celebrating growth also track your progress so we’ll go into the next couple slides just to show you how you track your progress now and if you keep doing check-ins with yourself every six months to a year you can actually track track your trending so you maybe this year you’re okay at something and three years from now you’re an expert man take open a bottle of champagne for that or it could be non-alcoholic doesn’t matter but open some bottle of something and celebrate it okay so this is our skills assessment template this is literally the one um I used for many years back in 2010 up until about 2016 or so um I once I developed a management team under me I kind of asked them to do this with their teams and it’s a practice that is unbelievable I do think that this could be a good class assignment actually to develop a skills assessment template what you do is you list out all the techniques under research and design and others and all the tools under those and just make this master list and by the way sometimes these things are going to change over time like it tracking was on our list we’ve never really done much of it we did it what one point it we just found it was too to to I don’t know what the word is like nerdy and it wasn’t actually giving us the results we really needed for the problems we needed to solve so we didn’t do it because it wasn’t relevant um there are content Management systems and development languages and things like that that have changed over the years so you can evolve this over the years in tools no one uses Photoshop in our organization anymore we also don’t even use sketch anymore we’re all on figma and aure um so they can evolve what you do is you come up with some type of uh way of coding your level of expertise we went 0 one two three kept it super simple because what if it’s a 10o scale are you really a seven or you really an eight Let It Go guys so zero means I’ve never done this maybe I’ve heard of it but I don’t really know what it is or how to do it one in this case means I’ve at least done this technique or use this tool once so I have a I have some degree of familiarity if somebody guides me I could get better at it two means you’re solid that if your boss says I need you to do this technique or use this tool for a project you say sure and do it okay real simple right that’s kind of the litness test for it and then three is I’m an expert I can teach others okay simple I just think that makes life a lot easier um so this this time slice was maybe in one year let’s say it’s 2023 next year you copy the column you paste it next to it and you update your numbers it’s very much like tracking your Fitness levels at the gym body fat percentage how much weight you can push all those kinds of things how far you can run so these are your metrics for you what I also tend to do is I tend to bold the areas some of these numbers are bolded the areas where I want to focus on right now that ties directly into that thing we called a detailed development plan towards seniority number two here so I go oh um stakeholder interviews user interviews I want to get more solid at that so I’m going to find Opportunities to specifically do that task flows site Maps wireframes just I need to do at least once so I can take my zeros and make them ones so go from zero to one’s really easy going from like a two to three is more difficult okay does this make sense has anyone ever done this before no okay I hope I’ve added some value today yes Quinn oh you have sorry good this is great maybe it’s something you could share with your colleagues that’s awesome mic up yeah there you go sorry yeah so I have different categories for um improvements and then I have let’s say health and in there I have like different goals um at the end of a year I check to see like where I am and where I want to be and then so next year comes I’ll either modify that or I’ll have the same goals and I’ll just keep working on it like I have like health education um I have like personal developments uh like people relation ships because I think that’s really important to like friendship families like um do I want to spend time more with friends and family um how do I do that right so I have to put that down I have a lot of things I want to do so that’s awesome that’s awesome and you should never have a goal of being an expert at everything like we we’re human beings right we’re not cars coming off an assembly line where you’ve got to meet some quality control across the board and everything needs identical like we have hearts we have emotions we have personalities so when you’re doing this um focus on the things that reflect who you want to be and work on that versus trying to compete with somebody else okay I will say that I tended to score highest across the whole Matrix but that was because I love this work and wanting to influence others and create an Oasis for other people because we didn’t have this in early part of our career we didn’t we weren’t parts of ux teams we were just soloists so it’s nice to create an environment for other people to do that and I I personally felt that the better I can get at everything that when I become a manager I’ll have credibility and respect and they will recognize that I’m not just being a manager for the glory of it which ain’t that glorious to be honest I’m doing it uh because I love what we do and I love my people and I want to create a space for them so it was natural that I kind of ranked pretty high at this stuff but if you’re a researcher I don’t care about your skill you shouldn’t care about your design skills it’s perfectly fine it’s okay um and likewise as a UI designer you might go I want to be familiar with research I don’t necessar want to be an expert so let this reflect you as a personality okay we’re all very different unique all right the other thing I promised a little asterisk there that I’ll show you is what a career planning template looks like so this is literally the clear career planning uh template I use with my team we before we start talking about the future we talk about the past first and this feels good feels really good because it lets you know what you’ve done what you’ve accomplished how much you’ve grown how awesome you are you talk about highlights you don’t go into all the weeds you talk about your high highlights and you summarize your academic accomplishments as well as well as your work accomplishments this is a beautiful thing it’s great it’s only feel good then you do your skills assessment that one we just looked at you figure out your areas to grow and you can then map that out to your development Plan Focus primarily on one year because that’s all within grasp it’s right Within Reach so think about projects and work and not maybe areas to learn to be trained on that support where you want to grow in your one-year plan and then start to think sketch out what three years looks like and five years Beyond is directional okay you may not actually get there but you might learn stuff along the way like Jermaine I think you you and I talked a lot you thought about becoming a product manager right product manager where are your feelings now about product manager and all is years years I still I still like the idea of becoming a product manager um for me it’s all about opportunity trying to find the best opportunity to move into that space is is kind of why I haven’t done it all out and kind of went into it so it’s more of an opportunity thing for me at this point if I find like the right opportunity that will allow me to kind of grow and actually go where I want to go there then I would probably take it so it’s it’s uh yeah it’s it’s all about opportunity for me yeah awesome uh let me close it out and that we that way we can take the last 10 minutes or so and do some more Q&A I see a couple of questions online here um some resources that uh my team provides publicly are the Ascend ux podcast uh you can learn so many great things from this podcast because we really Target um an audience of folks that are usually students or people who are transitioning over to ux so they’re super super relevant topics there you I know there’s some questions around interviewing and career path and all that stuff I promise there’s an episode out there for you and it’s led by aan beeh who is our uh designer uh manager of ux design based in Paris and the early episodes were actually led by um Evan sunwall as well who is now he left my team a couple years ago I’m proud to say because he’s now a an analyst at Neilon Norman Group which you guys should be uh familiar with yeah actually I don’t know his exact title but he’s a badass like he is one of the most analytical guys I know and he’s doing some really cool research reports and he’s on YouTube now and I just I’m so happy to see his growth it’s amazing um and the other one is a send blog uh which we just launched this year there’s few articles out there right now there’s going to be a couple articles published every month on various topics and these this is more topical um the current stuff that’s happening we have a a topic on AI that I published another one on using um doing conversational uis uh there’s a number of other topics out there okay uh that’s it I’m GNA leave you with this thought that don’t focus on the outcome focus on the process that’s even what I do when I make pizza just focus on the process I never focused on trying to make thousands of pizzas or having a pizza Persona or talk about pizza one day I focused on making pizzas my first ones were me and then all kinds of beautiful things happened in my life as it kept going down this path so focus on that process getting in your flow finding your creativity um taking care of having an healthy ego having these conversations with yourself and building out your Community all right you can now you have my information please don’t all hit me up at once by the way candidates do that a lot and it’s very endearing um until you have like 50 of them hitting you all up in LinkedIn at the same time it’s really tough sometimes because you want to do good by them you know that they’re working hard to get where they are but it’s sometimes hard to field at all but QR code will get you to my contact card through applicational blink you can also uh text me or email me all right be kind with my contact information um how do people contact you Germaine um LinkedIn is probably the best way um Jermaine Preston Jermaine Preston yeah it’s pretty easy to find we can also share my information with Liz so yeah but yeah definitely LinkedIn is the best way and that Robbie would probably agree with this we love helping people um level up their career so this is a a passion for both of us um for one it’s it’s it’s something we all enjoy so definitely don’t feel free to to reach out so so that’s the end of the talk let’s do some QA you want to answer the online ones or that’s the one I was just about to I so we had the AI question that y um so as technology like AI continued to evolve how do you see the role of ux changing do you want to go or me I’m giving a talk in two weeks about Ai and ux uh for human factors International so take a look at my LinkedIn I’ll post a link to it over there um that’s specifically I’ll be talking about um so the role of ux changing you know it’s interesting um because there’s two angles on that uh how do we leverage AI tools to work differently that’s happening very naturally like tools like Meo and figma and Photoshop and other tools have ai embedded in it right to help you generate images do card sorting Affinity diagramming um develop content you know instantly this is amazing guys it’s unbelievable I actually produce a uh story about the evolution of our product software from where we used to be to where we’re going to go in a few years with images and a entire script and I recorded a video and I shared it with my team and it’s all AI generated except for my voice I was just reading from the script that chat GT GPT G gave me and um the images I got from Del so the reason I did it was because I knew it would be a really cool thing to inspire my team they may not agree they might be like oh my boss is so corny but it’s okay I felt like it was an idea I wanted to explore and so I did it and it both showed them a way to use AI but also gave us um something that we could collectively imagine together of the evolution of our products and some storytelling to get connect with people to their hearts right um so that’s one thing our tools you know like I mentioned me these other ones it’s going to evolve the way we work you just have to embrace it period um the other part is the software and the websites and the things that we’re designing we can embed AI into the experience I think of it it like a pallet of colors as an artist you have all your standard colors and then you get that magic color you know the metallic iridescent one that glows and it does all these special things so it’s one of the things that we can embed into our user experience to supercharge experience so all the ways you guys are using benefiting from AI today think about that when you’re designing like how can you give that magic back to your end users so I I just embrace it but not everything can be a chat bot by the way okay please there’s other ways of doing really cool stuff um humanizing language I think is an incredible thing uh personalizing the experiences more and doing it more dynamically we have a really cool chat interface that we did embed into our products that reads all of our customer support well not customer support it’s kind of like uh product documentation from our customer support Community ingests it into the large language model and then we use a chat interface so when someone is having a challenge using our user interface like God forbid that would ever happen you yeah but it happens we’re not perfect then they can just chat and the AI will bring the answer to the Forefront and a link directly to the document that it got it from so you can go a little deeper that’s pretty cool couldn’t have done that before your thoughts about AI affecting ux um so my i’ it’s a very interesting thing a question coming from Google right we all know Google is kind of the innovator of lot of these technologies that we’re we’re looking at these days but um I think one of the more important things that I’ve been talking to uh people on my team so I have a PhD uh AI researcher on my my ux team that I work with um and he always talk we always talk about how uh AI is not going to take our jobs right so um I think that’s the one thing that we’re all a lot of us are concerned about is AI being something that can do our job for it so there are stuff that Robert’s talking about that AI can actually do like design and webs that’s perfect right I don’t know how many more times I want to lay out a new website with a button and uh a hamburger menu at the top right right like if that stuff is fine AI can do that stuff uh but what AI is never going to be able to do is be creative right so what we bring to the table is creativity AI does not do a good job with that right it doesn’t it actually can’t be creative it’s only as good as the data that’s fed to it these are real things right so um I don’t think it’s going to ever take our job so when we’re there’s there’s jumps that ux designers that creative people do that help us innovate and do new things in this world right AI is never going to be able to do that it’s only trained on data um so for us to make these jumps and Innovation it takes us taking information from all over the place right and be able to piece it together um and come up with these new ideas so I don’t think we’re um G to be impacted that much from that from that side of our careers I feel like ux will always be something that’s needed within technology so um I’m not one of those people that’s actually scared of AI you know you hear people talk about they’re scared of AI taking their jobs I don’t think that’s one of those things that’s going to happen to the US career um but it is going to actually make our lives easier like um like I said there’s a lot of stuff that can that that that can speed up my flow uh using these AI tools and I think that stuff is actually really cool like how how Robbie said you can you know generate scripts and all these things so um that stuff I think is is pretty amazing you you know you’ll see actually doing some experim experiments with figma uh to generate stuff uh like graphics and things like that like button Styles all these different things that as a designer after you’ve done it a couple times you don’t really want to create another button again right so it’s like those things I think is really cool that because it actually really speed up our our flow can actually help us be more efficient designers um and get things done faster so I’m a pretty big fan of it at at on that level um but I don’t think it’s going to take any of our jobs way so I think you know next 10 20 years now what happens when Quantum Computing comes into the play and all that stuff I don’t know we may it may be a little bit harder for us but I think you know over the next 10 20 years we should be fine um in space in as ux design so yeah I mean accounting softwares existed for a long time right uh turbox right but there’s still CPAs out there so this is a good question for us is how can we Leverage the tools but then also distinguish ourselves because AI doesn’t really do strategy you know AI doesn’t understand the human elements I mean AI is especially gentic AI is working off of models right and it hallucinates sometimes I know so it’s it’s interesting right and so that’s where you need uh the human so how do you position yourself how do you reposition yourself in the world of AI thank God for this because it challenges the box and the fixed mindset that we’re in right now and it changes it challenges us to grow it’s only going to keep doing this throughout your careers I promise I mean I’m totally dating myself right now there was no internet at one point guys you know that challeng that changed my career so um I was a print designer when I started out you know so there you go um look so I think we’re at time there was one or two more questions but I mean but we have a few minutes there’s a really good one around interviewing I think yeah we had one more um online so because there are so many applicants can you describe the process of how you decide who gets interviews yeah when it comes to viewing so many resum resumés portfolios what stands out to you to you you hit or me I just say one quick thing um your portfolio as probably everyone knows is so important um because like Robie said he had what 200 250 uh you know resumes L profiles portfolios he was looking at so you got to think about it how do you stand out in the crowd right and then usually it’s going to come down to your creativity um you know a lot often times we rely on templates and stuff like that to get our portfolios done which is fine but one way to stand out from that right is to have extreme creative portfolio that if somebody like Robbie is sitting there looking at all these you know over the day like yours is the one that catches their eye so I think really understanding the experience of somebody like himself that’s looking through all this stuff and this is how you’re going to get their eye by having something that is obvious really crazy that looks really good you know whatever the style that you choose to to go with um it’s really important to understand what what you can bring to the table um to get the eyeballs right cuz it’s it’s really hard when you I’ve been in this situation too it’s really tough looking through resumés and portfolios it’s like it gets very medane and you just kind of like going through the process so as soon as you see that one it’s like oh my God this is beautiful oh my God they use this crazy title oh they did this crazy thing right that type of stuff actually really matters for somebody like Robbie because he’s seeing so many of them it’s you need something to stand out so I I’ll let you get into yeah it’s it is a complex thing right because you have to distinguish yourself because when you have a couple hundred resumés I mean you have to sort through that so I’ll I’ll give you a couple of thoughts so let’s say you have distinguish yourself it’s going to be because great storytelling on your portfolio right uh because we want case studies that’s the standard right it’s case study walk me through it tell me how you think show me how you actually validated your work you did some upfront research don’t just show me the end product but tell me the whole story some of these portfolios they they cut short you know before I see the end product uh or they don’t set up the context the storytelling isn’t there so storytelling is really critical quality of design obviously it’s very critical you’re a designer um so we we’re going to look for that to a degree but your content is probably more important you could have pretty minimalist design uh depending on the role you’re going for it it’s it’s your content start with your storytelling get across your personality your expertise your inquisitiveness your curios I it um your interest in um in the organization that you’re trying to support you know like you got to you got to get all that stuff across so that’s the portfolio easy thing guys go do some Espionage go search for people’s portfolios go to LinkedIn and look for junior ux designers and look at their portfolios it’s not actually that complicated if you don’t if you’re not familiar then it’s you’re making an excuse you can easily go out there and see who your competition is you haven’t done that um you’re starting you know a few steps behind so similarly for your resume standard for resume one page especially if you’re more Junior in your career it makes sense you don’t have that much experience we don’t like reading bullet points we really don’t like reading bullet points it’s the same stuff we read it over and over and over so a little trick that I recommend I’ve been doing this for a very long time top your resume under your name and your contact information and usually I put a title to kind of disposition who I am for many years I put Robbie Singh ux architect because that was a little different and I wanted to say I’m just like a technical architect but I’m doing it for ux not ux Designer which sounded a level below so I really cared about that title it wasn’t my job title it was a title it’s the way I wanted you to see me so I’m starting my storytelling right from the beginning first thing do under that and about section don’t even need a about just take one sentence maximum two describe who you were who you were kind of says who you are and where you want to go what you’re looking for if you can structure it that way um I don’t need to read the rest of the resume pretty much then I’ll take a look at your education look at your tools and I’ll be like yeah check check check check um and I’ll look at the experience you had but keep it brief keep it concise but keep it meaningful if your experience includes kpis things like measurable things you did that changed something we increased uh page views we increased e-commerce we increased uh we decreased task failures all that stuff go this person gets it because if they can communicate that well in our resume they’ll be able to communicate well in our organization and your resume should look good it should look modern you know if it’s one column times new Roman pass I’m not even going to read it I hate to be harsh about it but we I have 200 more to go you know so the way the process usually works again so you don’t take it personally is that Talent acquisition and most companies will be the first ones to look at your resume they’re going to filter it for the hiring manager because imagine you have to manage an entire team and you have three posts out there and each post has 200 resumés as a hiring manager that’s going to take all of your time and now you can’t serve the business so us going to go through HR first they’re going to filter down they might use some tools get through the keywords and stuff um if you try to game the system and put a lot of keywords in there we’re gonna notice so really use keywords intentionally represent who you really are and you’ll get the job you’ll get match the job you really need to be in um so they do it first then that goes to the hiring manager and sometimes we’ll divy it up so that’s What I’ve Done actually split up between we kind of three of us we split up in thirds and and went through that then we dictated we determined who was going to be qualified for a phone screen so that’s we got to go through it that way like we don’t have hours to interview everyone equally so it’s difficult I’m not gonna lie about it all right um if you get through the phone screen and you get an interview feel good you’re really good about that now it’s your job to lose not to win because you’re already there for an interview we think you can do the job all right so that’s where U practice uh read go to Google ask read some like interviewing tips it’s all out there this is not a mystery on how to interview well okay and they’ll tell you everything you know and we have a podcast on this too so we’ll plug our podcast again um so on and so forth and then uh we down select with very long interviews where we’ll have multiple people interview oneon-one and then we usually will do like a design challenge or research challenge that’s a on hour um uh session where in real time you’ll work through a problem together uh now if you get a job with us you know you’ve joined the A Team should be very proud everyone else has been through it and you can relax and just do good work uh because we’ll onboard you and kind of take your time build you up into the team so I want to give a little extra detail because I know this is really critical for where you guys are in your career but also listen to the podcast and say oh I got one to add about your portfolio and I know a lot of you probably are putting like school projects on your portfolio make sure that you highlight that in the in the because it’s like as you’re as you’re reading it as somebody that’s sipping through this stuff if I don’t know if it’s a school project versus a real thing it just kind of makes things cloudy for the person that’s reading and trying to understand um your work so like make sure you’re as clear as possible of like the context of the work it’s really important um often times if I’m hiring somebody for a role I’m going to expect them to have those kind of projects um but if it’s not clear then I can’t put you in the right category if you will to understand oh well you’ll be perfect for this type of role versus this type of role so um it’s really really important to be clear about that and it’s also from that perspective um sometimes you know you pick up on people trying to make it seem like they’re not doing a school project and make it seem real and again it just comes off as kind of dis Hest so um often times they kind of just throw you away if they can’t understand you know if that project is a school related or a boot camp or something like that so really important to be clear there so any other questions are we good well cool cool hey thank you guys for uh letting us speak for Two Plus hours wow we did it we did it guys so um just thank you guys so much for giving us some time to connect with you all and uh I hope this has been valuable all right cool thanks guys [Music]