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NextIs a UX design career right for you?*

Last updated 4 months ago

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Who are you?

Hi, I'm !

I graduated from that didn't really have any established design programme (or alumni network).

I'm currently a UX designer at PlayStation. I've previously worked with Riot Games and have also received job offers from Blizzard, Respawn, and other AAA studios.

A lot of people have reached out to me with questions about getting into design, the games industry, and everything in-between.

I've shared the same type of advice to everyone I've had 1:1s with, but I feel like the sheer volume of information can be overwhelming.

I really admire how set out her guide to , and I thought it'd be useful to finally put everything I've talked about into words — both to continue sharing, and to collate all of my takes and experiences so far in one place.

I've found that the information that's been most helpful to me has come from peers in the industry that are closer to me experience-wise.

Hopefully some of this can help! If you pick up at least one thing from this, it'll have been a success

What this is (and isn't)

This is not a UX design explainer.

I don't feel like I'm in a place to educate on the theoretical (at least not yet lol, give it a decade or so)—that's what the super-long list of written by highly qualified professionals are for, and they do their job excellently.

This is more like a syllabus of what it takes to pivot into UX and get a design job; it's what I wish had existed for me when I first seriously considered UX design as a career path.

You'll find a lot of discourse in the design community about how new graduates — whether those from prestigious design programmes or later-in-career bootcamps — are unequipped for day-to-day work, need high levels of supervision and guidance, or simply don't meet industry standards.

This will try and fill in the gaps of the "soft skills" needed: how to optimise your approach, the things you need to think about before you even apply, and most importantly, how to diagnose what you need to improve.

A word of caution

Obviously, this advice doesn't guarantee anything.

Committing to a design career requires a lot of personal drive, effort, and time.

Breaking into design without an established background or previous experience is incredibly difficult and often unrewarding; it's undeniable that the market for junior designers has been oversaturated for a while now.

Although hopefully the future is less bleak, we've seen a ridiculous number of industry-wide layoffs which have affected designers regardless of their seniority or influence.

This means that competition is much higher in a far smaller pool.

You might be up against people who already have a big name or two on their resumes.

You'll experience a heartbreaking amount of rejection and unfairness on this journey — but then again, it's not like a lot of other career paths are fundamentally any different.