Profile yourself for sUXess

ASSESS • UX CAREER MENTORING

user-wizard-assess

Overview

Newcomers to UX often suffer from imposter syndrome — unrealistic expectations in many job descriptions contribute to this fear. It takes more than a list of practical skills to succeed in UX, and trying to master them all would take a lifetime. Assess is a framework that allows you to discover which transferable skills shape your UX profile, and to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

Welcome to your skills assessment journey

 

The first block of the User Wizard Mentoring Program is composed of 5 steps, each of them allowing you to take a deep dive into your professional career and profile.
Logistics
We use Miro for this assessment. If you are not familiar with this online white-boarding application, we invite you to watch this 3,5 minutes video.
During the program onboarding, you must have received an invitation to join The User Wizard Academy Miro Team. Once you create a free account, you get access to the boards developed specifically for this course. Each lesson contains one board (6 in total).
Self-introspection might be the most difficult process we have to go through as human beings — yet it is such a powerful tool! Before you start your career transition journey, take time to revisit your past career path:
  • what led you there?
  • what leads you away from this path?
  • what do you take with you?
  • what unique skills have you acquired, that can make a difference in a UX job hunt?
  • what are the drivers for your success and potential pitfalls?
This and much more are what you will be able to identify in this guided self-introspection exercise. And don’t worry, your mentor is available for you at every stage.
Once you completed this exercise, it’s time to get a professional review: together with your mentor, you will dress a complete and accurate UX profile of yourself. This shall be your north star throughout your journey.
💡 You may want to keep a copy of your updated CV next to you while completing this assessment — it could help you review your past working experiences.
Ready? Let’s start!

Getting started

Before you start

Welcome to your journey
 
The first block of the User Wizard Mentoring Program is composed of 5 steps, each of them allowing you to take a deep dive into your professional career and profile.

Logistics

We use Miro for this assessment. If you are not familiar with this online white-boarding application, we invite you to watch this 3,5 minutes video.

During the program onboarding, you must have received an invitation to join The User Wizard Academy Miro Team. Once you created a free account, you get access to the boards developed specifically for this course. Each lesson contains one board (6 in total).

Working with the Boards

These boards are templates – remember to duplicate them before filling them out.

Once you completed a board, invite your mentor as an editor

1:1 sessions and check-ins

Make sure to book a session once you completed the whole assessment, to go through the results of your introspection journey. In case you have questions or need some guidance during the assessment journey, send me an e-mail to hello@user-wizard.com

This is it for now, talk to you soon!

Your professional journey

Your professional journey

What’s this board about?

Every journey starts with a single step — in your case, this may be the decision to step out of a specific industry, or of Academia, to pursue a career in UX. That you are moving away from something does not mean that it is no longer valuable, far away from this!

In fact the foundations you acquired so far, whether studying or working, training or teaching, are the very key differentiators in your profile. 

This is exactly what we want to look into next.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane!

Talk to you soon,

 

 

Your transferable skills

Well done on the review of your career path. You now should be able to articulate with confidence what you learned from previous experiences, what you want to keep doing and what you are moving away from.

Now it’s time to focus on transferable skills. With the next board, we invite you to reflect on what each previous experience taught you.

Ready? Like with the the previous one, please duplicate the template before filling the board.

Have fun!

 

 

SWOT Analysis

Congratulations, you’re getting closer to the end of this assessment. 

Your skills are only one half of the equation: to build a successful career, you need to build a strong understanding of the job market and the field (your professional environment).

We prepared a SWOT analysis template to help you gather valuable insights. Knowing your environment is not enough, you will also need to learn how to leverage your strengths and control the risks.

Ready? Let’s hit this board!

Create your UX persona

If you are familiar with UX deliverables, you probably have created a user persona before. This helped you and your team empathise with the end users, understanding their needs, expectations, and goals…pretty much what your future employer needs to know about you, right?

Take a step forward and craft an actionable overview of your career goals, expectations, frustrations, and motivations factors.

Ready for the deep dive? Let’s start!

Own Your Narrative: your elevator pitch

Every career transition is unique – you may have earned a degree from the same institution as many others, and have comparable skills, your jour journey is unique, and so are you. 

Learning how to turn the narrative from “I am new to this” to ” this is what I can bring to your team” is maybe the most valuable skill you can develop.

In this lesson, you will get to do it! Do not thrive for perfection first, it’s an iterative process! Take your time, review your pitch, refine it, and when you’re ready, record it!

Pricing

€ 138

Details

All career levels

8-12 hours (recommended)

Prerequisites
Free Miro account
An elevator pitch for career switchers?

Why do you need an elevator pitch?

For many (most) people, an elevator pitch is a salesy, over-confident, and overreaching monologue delivered by desperate people in dire need of investors come up with, in the hope they will convince a bunch of opportunistic investors to buy in their life dream.
Let’s try to reframe this mental model to something closer to your own experience. Imagine you got invited to a job interview for your dream job within the UX industry: you’ve been working on this career transition for months, you studied, practiced, and grew your foundational and practical knowledge and here you are, hungry to get started and earn your official UX job title.
You sit in front of your interviewer and the first question they ask you is:
“Can you tell me about yourself?”
Does this sound familiar? If so, probably because it is (under various forms) the most usual ice breaker during job interviews. And it is far from being a trivial question: this might be for you, as a career switcher, one of the most important questions you may have to answer.
  • Who are you?
  • What led you to a career in the UX industry?
  • Why made you decide to change?
  • What do you bring to the table?
If you can answer these questions within 2 to 3 minutes, chances are high that you will catch the attention of your interviewer and get a good start to this process.
Let’s get this pitch ready!
Answer a few questions

How to get started?
Over the last few activities, you have identified your unique transferable skills, your strengths and weaknesses, and have dressed an overview of your career and identified the milestones that led you here, as so many steps that naturally led you to a career in the UX industry.

To help you get started, try to answer the following questions:

  1. what does your UX persona tells about you?
  2. what led you to a career in the UX industry?
    • at this stage, it is essential you can present your journey as a succession of logical steps that led you to UX
  3. what experiences, acquired skills, abilities, prepared you to a career in UX?
  4. how do you make it fit in a 3 minutes pitch?
Do you have it? Let’s put this down on the paper!
Design your pitch
Ideate: diverge, try, explore
First thing first: put your ideas, keywords, or sketches (if you’re a visual person) on the paper. Do not restrain yourself, put ideas down, without judgment: you are in an ideation phase!
Select: converge, choose, sharpen
Now the time has come to identify the best concepts, words, and examples. What milestones in your career represents best your development or evolution? These are the ones you want to keep. Be authentic, sometimes our biggest failures are exactly what helped us grow!!
Deliver: wrap-it up, make it impactful
Write your final script down: it must be sharp, straight to the point, personal, and authentic.
Got it? Time to go live!

Unlock your full potential

Access all 5 boards

€ 138

  • including 2 hours 1:1 mentoring
  • life-time access to the board
  • personalized feedback

Get In Touch

Ready to Get Started?

Send an email to hello@user-wizard.com to unlock your access to your personal UX skills assessment board.

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