UX Resume review / referral / 20+ YoE and perplexed?
Hello, I'm new to Blind and very new to the way of thinking about career paths I'm seeing here. I'm looking for some feedback and suggestions about how to proceed. Ideally I'd like to get into a FAANG (or other big tech) but not sure where I'd slot in. I've worn many hats, and spent a lot of years managing my career on the premise of being a "unicorn", the designer / developer type who would tackle anything. It's always kept me employed. What I've learned though is that that probably hurt me, as the industry clearly bifurcated into Designer or Developer, at least in big tech, and as someone who spent a lot of time as a hybrid, I feel I might be in a weaker position. I know my skillset is not weak, but rather, fitting it in at a big tech company looks from the outside like it might be a problem. I've been doing this for 25 years. And only in the last couple years did I realize I had to manage my path MUCH differently than I've been doing. It's mind blowing but I missed out on / didn't catch on to how younger people move from company to company, have aggressive goal oriented learning paths, and aggressively move out of positions that don't get them where they want to go. I had a heavy dose of "just do great work, be a good guy, and the company will treat you right". That is OLD SCHOOL and I now realize that is the path of death. My dad worked at AT+T for 35 yrs, so that is my example. That doesn't exist any more, lol. So this new and modern career management realization has hit me like a panic attack, kinda :) Overall, I feel "imposter syndrome" even at this point in my career. I truly don't understand this phenomenon but here I am :/ On to the resume: So on the resume below, the second company listed is a global management consulting company (one of the top 10 or so in terms of prestige), but consulting work is NOT like siloed big tech. It's 100% hands on, self-directed, high stress kind of work. That's why I got out :) but now am not sure how to position myself for the current "silo" approach to UX - and I want to fully move away from being a "developer" though I'm glad to participate in it partially. I have simply come to a crossroad where I had to choose design (and all it entails, like research), or development (and learning JS frameworks and being a code jockey), so I choose design. And I had to list the consulting firm and then each client (75% all big names everyone knows) How does this resume advantage me or disadvantage me? How could this be positioned better for Principal UX Designer roles? Where is a good place to try and slot myself in? Again, I feel like I'm in a weird spot where I'd love to own a product, or evangelize for enterprise design systems, and not so much function like senior designer, though I can do all that of course. And if anyone reading this knows of an open slot I might fit and you'd refer me, I'd love to chat. Thanks for taking a look. Word of roast or encouragement all appreciated. #design #ui/ux #ux #uxdesigner
Hmm, from a resume perspective, if you’re looking a principal designer role at Meta (Level 6+), you need very strong visual design, interaction design, and product thinking skills. Taking a project from ideation to pixel perfect execution is something ALL designers are expected to do, so “wire framing” or “delivering hifi prototypes” does not indicate you’re senior. Your resume talks a lot about the processes you did, but not as much about identifying ambiguous problems to solve or leading product and design strategy. An L6 may drive multiple initiatives for a team, the work is innovative, large in scope, and they solve complex problems. They navigate ambiguity, and they’re able to unblock themselves and others, initiate and lead new work. The designer is seen almost as a visionary or a thought leader who drives and initiates work that influences multiple teams. Getting a team to adopt Figma isn’t necessarily driving a new innovative product initiative. While finding operational efficiencies and adopting new tools is great, it’s not the same kind of design impact that Meta would look for in a principal designer.
New drinking game: take a shot every time a Meta employee repeats the buzz-phrase “solving ambiguous problems.”
No, the drinking game should be whenever a Meta employee says the word “impact”. We are obsessed with impact. Pretty sure I’m the only one who talks about solving ambiguous problems on Design Blind, so you can take a shot whenever I comment lol.
Sound like you worked for a mom popup for the last 25 years.
Dm
Honestly, your resume doesn’t matter that much. That’s also old school thinking. Things like your college GPA don’t matter. And others may disagree, but for me, if I’m hiring a senior+ designer, I want the resume to look like it was designed, not a Microsoft word template. But back to my original point, your portfolio matters so much more than a resume document. Show me what you’ve done and why it mattered. And one last thing…you may be a genius level designer for all I know. But I would not expect to grade out at principal or lead, especially at a FAANG, just because you have 20 years of experience. There is such a thing as bad or meaningless experience, and you may need to mentally prepare for that reality check.
Honestly, when you worked for 20 plus years, resume doesn’t matter at all.
Agreed resume is not that important for UX roles. Your portfolio and interview are most important. If you’re not getting interviews, your portfolio is almost certainly the problem. There is a niche for hybrid roles in big tech though. They are called various things - design technologists, UX engineers, product design prototypers.
Agreed. It’s 100% the portfolio.
Such a long post but something very critical is missing. Hint - the missing acronym includes a “T” and a “C”
^^i agree it would be great to know your TC at 25 YOE and the COL you’re in. I have much less work experience then you but was also shocked into how others my age were moving, as I started a company young and stayed there a decade. I do not regret it, but I’ve learned from it, and some lessons I don’t plan on learning twice. Resume is definitely too long/wordy, lacks any visual interest and screams “Jack of all trades”, which unfortunately can hurt you nowadays. Start with condensing that and making it look appealing, and follow that up with a killer portfolio website. Considering your coding experience I’d be expecting more than Wordpress, but also not necessarily custom built. But something eye catching for sure.
If you want to be a designer and move out of dev roles remove the dev title from your resume from the design related most recent roles. Have a very shot line at the top saying who your are and what you want to do I.e. “UX designer with 25 years of experience.” I’m guessing your portfolio is linked in the top blanked out box? Change your roles to something like: “Principal UX Designer” “UX design manager” “Principal web developer and software engineer” is fine “UX/web design consultant” “Freelance design/developer” is fine Your resume, at first glance, is confusing. A hiring manager/recruiter is going to look at this for less than 30 seconds before deciding if they want to read more and at first glance you look like you might be a developer. So you want that focused intro line and the title to be more focused. UI UX DESIGNER AND DEVELOPER looks confusing as heck. Remove ui. UI/UX makes you look design immature. You’re resume, like your post, is way too long. Be short, succinct and to the point. Especially your earlier experience. You need to re-edit your second most recent job. Look at how designers from top agencies write about their agency experience. You can name drop in one line. As is, it’s super redundant, hard to read, and makes you look super scattered. Perhaps call out the two most recent ones. And then combine the earlier ones. The design of the resume has a lot to be desired as well. I’m unsure why you decided to do both centered and left aligned. It’s hard to read. Lines are way too long. If I got your resume I would have rejected you based off of the design of the resume alone.
Good stuff. I see everything you are saying very clearly. Move from descriptive to prescriptive. Will do. Thanks!
Yeah, look up designers from a product focused design agency like ideo, frog, or something and see how they talk about that experience. Also this is from the lens of trying to get a job say Apple or something where visual design is huge. And for the UX focused ones at big tech, dev experience is helpful and can put you over the line for hire/no hire but it’s still secondary.