Think you might want to be a UX designer? Well you're in luck!
We spoke with a senior UX designer who’s worked at companies including AT&T and Johnson & Johnson – and now runs his own agency. Here are his best tips for students on how to land an internship in this space.
🎓 Degree(s)
🏫 School
🔨 Skills & qualities
🧠 Knowledge
2. What companies you can apply for
🔍 Resumes
🎨 Portfolio
📄 Cover letters
🕴️ Interviews
4. How to secure a return offer
Note: If you need a refresh on what UX design means, head over to What in the world is a "UX designer"? A guide for students.
I think there's enough information on Youtube and Udemy that your degree doesn’t matter that much in this field. This is because:
Foundation matters, but you still have to keep learning on the job. Even 9 years in, I'm still learning new things – now I’m learning to prototype in Figma, for instance. So whatever your foundation is, you're still going to build on top of it.
The on-the-field experience (= your portfolio) is what really matters.
In fact, if I could redo one thing about my career, I'd spend less money on college courses and learn more about UI/UX from free platforms.
That said, here are some degrees or courses that would help provide a good foundation in UI/UX design:
Psychology: Because UX is about being able to predict and understand the user, I would say psychology is helpful for achieving that. I probably wouldn't take a whole curriculum on it, but I'd definitely say it helps, since you can anticipate the user that a business is targeting.
Graphic design: I’ve seen a lot of graphic designers converting into UI/UX designers (myself included). Graphic design is helpful for the UI (User Interface) side of things. As a graphic designer, you have to design so many different things – flyers, banners, and different advertising assets. Since these aren’t interfaces, there’s a lot more that you can play around with, and I think the creativity from that helps me a lot today still when I work on UI's as it helps me think of ideas, especially when I work on a product that hasn't been made before – that's when you need to rely on your creativity.
With product and UX having grown as a field, there are probably also more defined UX courses and curriculums in college that are worth checking out.
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
I’m not sure it really matters what school you went to. You could have a really good portfolio and blow past any other applicants from a prestigious school.
That said, Pratt is a common one I’ve seen on colleagues’ LinkedIn profiles. But I’ve worked with UX designers from a variety of schools, including state schools.
So I don’t think you need to be from an art & design school, though these may have more alumni who work in the field, and it may be easier for you to network with them as a result (I got my first internship through an alum of my school for instance!)
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
Hard skills
HTML and CSS: These are the programming languages you’d need to build a website. You don't need to be as proficient as a front-end developer but understanding the basics will help you when you need to hand off designs to developers.
Design tools: Figma is the industry standard at this point but coming in, it's also good to be familiar with other tools like Sketch, Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator, FramerX since there are many companies (and I mean those companies that everyone's heard of) that still use these.
Prototyping programs: There are also prototyping programs like Protopie and other rapid prototyping programs that are coming out that would be good to know.
Soft skills
Being receptive to feedback: Even if you've spent hours on your design, it doesn't really belong to you; it belongs to the team. It's easy to get defensive and not be open to feedback. Even if your team members are misinformed, it's still helpful to take their criticism in a constructive way.
Being articulate: As a UX designer, your job isn't over when you finish a design! When you present your designs to clients or stakeholders, they may have pushback.. Maybe they had a business requirement that you changed a little. In that case, you'll need to convince them that you came up with a better approach that results in a better user experience. (You can look up designers you respect on Youtube and learn from how they walk people through their designs.)
Qualities
These are the qualities that good UX designers have:
Curiosity
Empathy
Consideration
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
We go into this in more detail in What’s it like to be a UX designer?[LINK]
Here are some key things to know if you’re trying to break into the field.
The foundations of UI/UX
UX focuses on solving problems for the user and meeting the business requirements.
UI: Remember that you're designing for an interface; you're designing for usability. It’s not a flyer, which just needs to look good; it needs to be usable. You’ll need to consider things like “People’s thumbs are near the bottom of the phone, so we need to put buttons there and not at the top of the interface.”
Key terms & concepts to be familiar with
Low, mid, high fidelity wireframes
user flows
site map
information architecture
design system (used to be called 'atomic library')
user testing vs usability testing (they're different - user testing happens in the beginning without a design. usability testing happens after the design.)
UAT (user accessibility testing) - this is where your development team builds a staging environment where you, the designer, can look at what's been built so far
user personas
competitive analysis
user research
Keeping up with the product space
As a UX designer, you need to stay up to date with trends in the product space. For instance, you don't want to be a designer today and not know about AI. Even when I'm not working, if I'm using an app and I notice something cool, I'll screenshot things and save it in a "UX discovery" folder. That helps me see what's up-to-date
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
Definitely cast a wide net. These days, with all the tech layoffs happening, there's a lot of senior and mid-level designers willing to take lower-level spots.
My advice would be to:
Aim for companies that hire tons of interns and fresh grads. An example of this is Johnson & Johnson which hires tons of interns and fresh grads for its Technology Leadership Development Program (TDLP). This is where I’ve seen the most interns, and many of them convert to full-time roles. If you can find an employer like this, get into their internship programs, and do a good job, that's the surest way to break into the field.
Find gigs with small companies that can get things into your portfolios.
- Marketing agencies can be a good starting point. They often hire a mix of experience levels, so don't count yourself out as a newbie. Plus, you'll get to dive into different projects and learn tons in a fast-paced environment.
More generally, here are some industries that you can consider besides tech:
Healthcare: Healthcare companies tend to be stingier with product, which is why they’ll hire more interns and fresh grads.
Telecom: AT&T also hires a lot of junior designers.
Banking & financial services: Banks and financial institutions like Bank of America or JP Morgan tend to have a lot more funding for product teams, which means bigger design teams and probably the highest pay outside large tech companies like Facebook and Google. That said, because of their bigger budgets, they also tend to hire more mid-level or senior designers.
It really depends on the business and what it needs – some businesses have more complex product needs and may not feel comfortable hiring juniors.
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
Hint: You can find plenty of internships on Prosple. We have a vast selection of internships curated for students like you.
My main advice for resumes is to tailor your resume for different employers. I have multiple types of resumes.
I have a main resume which caters to the things companies look for across the board, based on what I’ve seen from their job descriptions.
I’ll also have different versions that focus on specific things. For instance, if a job asks for more front-end development skills, I’ll have a version where I speak more to that. If a job is at a creative agency, I have a version that highlights my agency experience.
So if a company is looking for specific skills and maybe you have those skills but your original resume doesn't show that well, it's helpful to have different versions of your resume to highlight certain things.
Every company has different keywords they look for, which you’ll be able to tell from their job description. So make sure you put as many of those keywords in your resume as makes sense. I keep a part of my resume where I call out some of the programs that I use and the skills that I have for this reason.
More generally, as designers, we're expected to think outside the box with our own resumes. So think of creative ways to put some personality into your resume, showcase your style, and make sure it's easy on the eyes for hiring managers. Hire managers get dozens and dozens of resumes to look through so anything you can add to your resume to stand out in a positive way and still keep it concise and well formatted help you get further than the competition out there.
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
For more advice on resumes, check out How to craft a winning resume as a college student.
Your portfolio is the most important part of your application, as it’s the ultimate proof that you can do the job.
Keep clients and companies in mind. Hiring managers will be looking at a lot of portfolios, so keep it simple. Make sure your case studies are succinct and make it easy for them to navigate to whatever case study they want to look at. Make it easy for them to quickly understand what your process was and what your role was in each piece.
Make your portfolio as diverse as possible. You know how actors get typecast? Well, that happens to designers too. If you have too many projects in one industry, they think you might not be as good to make designs in other industries, even though the skills are the same. If I could rebuild my portfolio, I’d make sure to have pieces from all different industries.
Triple check all the words in your portfolio. Hiring managers are looking for a reason to eliminate you since they're looking at dozens and dozens of portfolios – and if you have some typos, that’s one reason for them to scrap your application. That just happened to me last year actually – the recruiter told me that. So I went through my portfolio and checked every single word.
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
Definitely submit a cover letter even if it's optional, since you never know how a hiring manager is going to eliminate applicants. They may need to count out the people who didn't submit a cover letter. You don't want to give them any excuse to archive your submission.
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
I've done interviews with companies where there was just one round, but I've also had companies where there were four rounds, maybe with another round with the VP. Here are the most common questions I’ve encountered that would be asked to a junior designer.
How do you work with managers and stakeholders? (They're trying to see if you are going to be a “yes” person that's going to do whatever a project manager or a stakeholder asks you to do. If you do, you're letting people who aren't specialists take over the work. You need to collaborate with them but make sure you can be an advocate for your designs.)
Tell me about a time you got feedback from a stakeholder or a product manager. How did you respond to it? (They want to know you're diplomatic and won’t be defensive about feedback from different teams.)
Tell me about a difficult challenge and how you resolved it. (Just follow the STAR method for this one.)
What are your weaknesses? (They want to see how you respond to it, where your ego is.)
And don't forget about questions about the pieces in your portfolio. Get ready to talk shop about your work! Companies love to dig into what you've done before and recently. It's like their sneak peek into how you think and create. So make sure to create UX case studies and be ready to share the stories behind your designs.
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson
Related: 7 sample responses to "What's your biggest weaknesses?" for students[LINK].
I believe it's all about making yourself indispensable. Showing your passion and love of product design, your ability to be a team player, taking on challenges, and not being afraid to pitch in wherever you can. And lastly networking 24/7 is a way to balance the lack of return office. The larger and better your network the more you don’t have to rely as much on return offers.
– Former UX designer @ AT&T and Johnson & Johnson