UX Academy: Career Services Support
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This article covers everything you need to know about Career Services. Questions covered in this article:
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What can I expect in Career Services?
Think of Career Services as phase 3 of UX Academy. The overall goal is to help you identify job opportunities and make sure you have the resources and feedback you need to capitalize on them!
All students have access to focused Career Services support for up to 26 weeks after finishing UX Academy, as well as lifetime access to ongoing career support. Upon graduation, you can take advantage of four key aspects:
1. Career Coach
Our Career Coaches are specialist mentors who not only have significant UX/UI design experience, but also have industry hiring experience or a track record of landing jobs at well-known companies. You’ll meet with your Career Coach up to 26 times and they’ll provide guidance with any aspect of the job search and application process.
Whether you’re looking for full-time, part-time, internship, or freelance work, your Career Coach can help you streamline your online presence, add extra polish to your portfolio, prepare for interviews, sharpen your networking skills, and understand the art of negotiating and accepting offers.
The job hunt can be stressful, and your Coach is there to support you and help you build confidence!
2. Curriculum
While in Career Services, you’ll also have access to a lightweight curriculum (4–10 hours/week) that will help you keep your design skills sharp and help you prep for interviews and whiteboard challenges.
3. Resources
While in Career Services, you’ll have access to Huntr, an app that will help keep your job search organized and on track. You can find job and networking opportunities in the designated Career Services channels of our Discord community, and you can also reach out in these channels with any questions about your job search.
Lifetime Support
You'll always have access to your course platform, curriculum and project materials, and our Discord community. This means you'll have lifetime access to the Career Services curriculum and the job and networking opportunities shared amongst our community.
Career services policies
You can review your Career Services policies here.
Please note: Even if your city isn’t currently on our list of cities that are eligible for the Tuition Reimbursement Policy, we promise to provide you with the same level of support and guidance as any other UX Academy graduate.
I’m in Career Services, how many jobs will I need to apply to per week?
All students in Career Services are expected to be applying for generalist UX, UI, or Product Design roles (whether full-time, part-time, internship, or freelance).
Please refer to the Career Services policies page for full details of what’s expected.
Networking events and informational interviews in Career Services
What are Networking Events?
During Career Services, you will touch upon many different important topics that will help you be successful with your job search. One of the most important tools is networking. Students are expected to attend at least 1 networking event and 1 informational interview each month in Career Services.
To make the most out of your networking, it's important to remember what the goal of these events is. Ultimately, they are meant to help you get comfortable with speaking directly to industry professionals, to make meaningful connections, and to expand your network.
Examples of what counts as a Networking Event
Here are examples of what counts as a networking event:
- In-person or virtual UX Design-related meet-ups where you will have the opportunity to speak 1:1 with industry professionals
- In-person or virtual conferences where you are able to connect 1:1 with industry professionals
What doesn't count as a Networking Event
With that said, here are events that don't count as networking events:
- Pre-recorded conferences
- Webinars
- Any event where you will not be able to speak 1:1 or connect with other design professionals
If you are ever unsure of whether an event will count as a networking event, you are welcome to double-check with us by writing in.
Where to find Networking Events
Should it be challenging to find in-person networking events in your area, we strongly recommend for our students to look online at websites for virtual networking opportunities:
- Reaching out via LinkedIn or Angel.co to professionals working in an industry/company that you'd like to learn more about
- Joining Slack or Discord communities dedicated to UX Design and connecting with design professionals for 1:1 conversations
- Meetup.com has both in-person and virtual events
- Eventbrite.com has both in-person and virtual events
- The Calendar section in your UX Academy dashboard has some networking events as well (please note that not all are networking events, so please be sure to confirm beforehand)
What is an informational interview?
An informational interview is a one-on-one coffee (or virtual coffee) meeting with an industry professional to understand their role, experience, industry, etc. better, and to connect with them professionally.
We encourage you to connect with different professionals in the field and industry that you are interested in learning from, working with, getting to know better. The interviewees should be working in the UX field (i.e. product designers, product managers, design leads, etc.) or the industry (i.e. professionals in edtech, healthcare, e-commerce, etc.) that you are interested in pursuing.
I'm in Career Services, and I've been hired!
First off, congratulations to you!! We'd love to know more about the position, so that we can both have accurate reporting and understand how to improve the experience for future students. You can let us know more via the "I've been hired" survey in your Career Services dashboard.
What's next in Career Services?
If the role is part-time, or less than 30 hours per week, you can opt to remain in Career Services for the rest of your sessions until landing a full-time position, as long as you are continuing to meet the weekly activity requirements.
If the role is greater than 30 hours per week, this most likely means you won't be continuing with your job search at this time, which means you've achieved the goal of Career Services! At this point, your enrollment in Career Services can be considered complete, but don't worry, you'll continue to have access to the dashboard, Discord, and Huntr.
This being said, we do recognize that you may want to connect with your mentor for a few more sessions to discuss jumping in to the position or negotiating aspects of your offer. We offer the option to opt in to 2 more sessions with your Coach to be used within 2 weeks.
I’m in Career Services, and I haven’t landed a job yet.
Try not to worry—some of our biggest student successes have come later in the process. The key is to stay focused on your goal and have faith in the process. Stay inspired by reading some of these success stories—and see if any of these graduates’ tips could apply to you.
To give yourself the best chance of finding a job, we recommend:
- Keep checking in on the Job Boards in Discord for any new job listings.
- ⭐️ Continue networking ⭐️ this is the most important part of any job search.
- Use your time to work on personal projects and build up more experience. You can find project ideas in your Career Service dashboard, or participate in a Behance challenge, Daily UI, or Canva challenge.
- Contact your local charities and see if there are opportunities to get real-world experience through volunteer work.
Career Services and networking resources
The job search is no easy task, and we hope that you're leveraging all the resources available to you through your journey.
Peer Sessions
In addition to working with your mentor on your job search game plan, consistently applying to jobs, and networking monthly, we'd encourage you to attend Career Services Peer Sessions for some group support led by a Career Coach. These are held on almost a daily basis, and you'll find the link to sign up for sessions via the link in your dashboard.
Volunteering/Freelance Work
If your schedule allows it, we'd definitely recommend putting in some time towards a new project through volunteering or a freelance project. In addition to job listing sites, several opportunities are shared via the community Discord in the #junior-to-mid-level channel.
Further Reading
If you're looking for an extra boost to your store of career search knowledge, we've compiled a list below of our best blog posts on networking, interviewing, and beyond.
Networking:
LinkedIn and interviewing:
Career path and job search:
Why you don't need to work in tech to launch your UX career
Career Services mentor/Career Coach pairing
How does mentorship work in Career Services?
We know how important a Career Coach is for your Career Services journey, and we want to make sure you feel supported throughout your job search. In addition to the rigorous vetting process to become a UX Academy mentor, our Career Coaches are required to either have in-depth hiring or managerial experience, or are established enough in their career to understand the challenges and hiring process in the industry.
You can rest assured that each of our coaches is thoroughly vetted to be able to support UX Academy graduates in how they need at this stage. Different from a design mentor in UX Academy, your Career Coach is supporting you through interviews, design challenges, networking, and ultimately preparing you for the job search ahead.
We take into consideration several factors from availability to expertise to preferences when pairing students with Coaches, but we cannot always guarantee a perfect personality match. The onus is first on students to ensure they're being communicative with their expectations and needs as they're learning.
I’m in Career Services, and I’d like to switch mentors.
If a student has not worked with their mentor for at least two weeks, we will kindly ask for students to first give their Career Coach a fair opportunity to align on expectations. Candid, but respectful communication is extremely integral in any mentor-mentee relationship, and this means speaking up to your mentor if you want things to change. Voicing your feedback not only offers an opportunity for growth to your Coach, but is an essential skill for you as a designer working with future stakeholders and team members, ultimately shaping you into a stronger designer and candidate.
If you have given your Career Coach a fair shot, and you have put in the effort to communicate and align on expectations, we can offer a mentor switch as the last resort. If you feel you would like to request a new mentor in such cases, please contact the CX Team.
If your Coach has been unresponsive, it's important to keep in mind that mentors are busy working professionals who mentor in addition to full-time jobs. However, we do set an expectation that they should respond within 48 business hours of you uploading work.
Note that you can always find your mentor’s contact information within your dashboard on the right-hand side, and we’d encourage you to first communicate directly with them.
If you haven’t heard back from your Career Coach within the expected timeframe, please let us know and we’ll help sort things out!
I'm in Career Services and I'm not matched with a Career Coach in my location?
We know that having understanding of one job market might not apply directly to the next. We want to support students in their unique goals for their job searches, so as UX Academy graduates begin their journey in Career Services, we do our best to match them with a Coach with expertise of students' specific job search locations. We ask students to indicate their primary and secondary job search locations upon graduation, and this helps inform our mentor matching process in Career Services.
This said, taking into account the ever-changing base of Coaches and mentees, and the numerous factors considered in mentor matching, we cannot guarantee that your Career coach will be based in your location. We do our best to ensure they have experience in your primary job search location and can support you in your job search needs.
In the last 2 years, we've also seen that much of our community has taken advantage of working remotely - as such your Career Coach may not physically be present in your primary job search location at the time of pairing, but please rest assured that they have approved experience and expertise in that job market.
For more information on how our Career Coaches are vetted and paired to students, please see here.
Can I delay my Career Services launch?
Congratulations on graduating from UX Academy!
Per our Career Services requirements, students are required to start Career Services immediately after graduating from UX Academy. This said, we absolutely understand that life happens and that there may be extenuating circumstances requiring you to take a break between graduation and beginning Career Services. If this is the case, students may choose to take a pause upon being launched in Career Services. Students are eligible to take 1 week of pause during Career Services. This pause time will not affect Tuition Reimbursement Policy eligibility or impact the duration of your enrollment in Career Services. We are able to approve up to 60 days of time away, but do note that taking any pause beyond your 1 standard week of pause will not extend your time in Career Services, and will render you ineligible for the Tuition Reimbursement Policy.
The reasoning behind why we require students to work through Career Services without taking an extended pause, outside of wanting to maintain your job search momentum, is that when students need to take a long break from their job search, this often means losing touch with your design skills, making it more difficult to assess whether you are still a good candidate for the roles to which you are applying. We want to make sure that you're setting yourself up for success while taking care of yourself how you can.
Staying active in Career Services
Different from UX Academy, we understand that in Career Services, a lot of your job search may take place outside of the Designlab dashboard - from reaching out on Linkedin, to scheduling interviews via email, to tracking your applications in Huntr. Ultimately, the requirements of the course and resources we offer are there to support you in your job search and how they work best for you. This said, the curriculum and cadence for Career Coach sessions were designed in this way to build your momentum in the job search and support you how we've seen it to be successful.
With all this in mind, it's important that students are being communicative with both their Career Coach and the internal Designlab team if there's anything preventing them from remaining active in the program.
As noted in our Career Services policies, students are required to maintain minimum activity requirements to remain enrolled in Career Services. If a student has not submitted work or met with their Career Coach for 2 or more weeks, our system will mark them as inactive. While inactive, students are not able to schedule sessions or submit work. Should you fall inactive in Career Services however, no need to worry! You'll be able to reactivate your enrollment using your dashboard when you're ready to return - as long as you have sessions remaining with your Career Coach, and have not reached your end date of Career Services. It’s important to note that being marked as inactive is not the same as being paused.
If students are not meeting these requirements to stay active, they are at risk of being flagged inactive in Career Services, which can be grounds for withdrawal from the program and render them ineligible for the Tuition Reimbursement Policy.
How do I stay active in Career Services?
- Submit any overdue work
- Reach out to your Career Coach to schedule your next session via your Designlab dashboard
- Reach out to our CX Team if you are struggling and are concerned about remaining active