Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

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Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

Career Services Orientation

Lesson: Common Skills & Competencies

5 minute read

It’s important to showcase your skills to potential employers—that’s why they’re going to hire you! You know that your portfolio is the best place to demonstrate those hard-fought design skills, but it’s not always the easiest place to get across your soft skills, such as communication and collaboration. It’s the combination of your design skills and soft skills that makes you a great employee and co-worker (and your job application irresistible to hiring managers).

Let’s take a quick look at what employers are looking for in terms of hard and soft skills, and how you can evidence them at the right places in your portfolio and job applications.

Hard skills: How you technically get your design work done

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Hard skills are displayed in the execution of your design process and how well you use the right tools (digital or analog) to create your project deliverables. They include:

User research: Shaping the direction of how a problem is approached.

Information architecture: Setting up the overall structure of your website or app

Interaction design: Showing how users will interact with a product or service

Wireframing: Sketching out the visual hierarchy and content planned for your designs

User interface design: Transforming your wireframes into high-fidelity mockups

Prototyping: Making your mockups interactive for rapid evaluation and iteration

Testing: Identifying what’s working well and what may be causing usability problems

Soft skills: How you communicate and collaborate with co-workers

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Demonstrating soft skills is especially important at the beginning of a design career. The top four soft skills that employers are usually looking for are communication, collaboration on teams, critical thinking, and creative thinking. Let’s dig a little deeper into each of them.

Communication: This covers written business communication, verbal (spoken) communication, quality of writing in your deliverables, presenting your work to others, and storytelling.

Collaboration on teams: Good teamwork skills include establishing roles and goals when working with others, creating shared project plans, aligning on work expectations, and giving and receiving feedback on work in progress.

Critical thinking: Your ability to bring logic and reasoning into your design deliverables and decisions. This skill is often stressed in design critiques with your teams, where you must clearly explain and defend your rationale.

Creative thinking: Coming up with a variety of ideas throughout your UX design process, especially when your teams need fresh perspectives.

Along with the above, designers are often asked to demonstrate leadership skills with regard to helping drive key deliverables, which builds on the above.

Bringing in skills laterally from other design disciplines

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While hard and soft skills are extremely important in getting hired, there are additional skills you can draw from lateral design disciplines that will help you become an even stronger designer. Things like UX writing, deeper expertise in user research methods, a basic understanding of web development, data-driven design, content design, and design systems are all skills that get leveraged on modern design teams.

How to make your skills stand out

There are certain things you can do when preparing your job applications and getting into the interview process that makes your skills more apparent to recruiters and hiring managers:

In all of your job applications, use a clear, authentic writing style that demonstrates your communication skills. Remember to highlight projects that demonstrate the skills you want to get hired for in the future.

In your portfolio, go into greater detail regarding how you used a variety of skills to complete your capstone projects. Along with your hard skills, did you mention the depth of creative thinking you brought to your project ideation? Is your critical thinking evident in how traceable your user research is to the proposed UX solution?

You communicated and collaborated a lot while in UX Academy with your mentor and other students. Giving and receiving feedback, just like you did during Group Crits, is a skill that you'll continue to practice professionally!

Be vocal about your goals for learning new skills. UX design is a profession that requires lifelong learning, and hiring managers will want to see if you will bring this mindset to how you’ll approach the job.

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