Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

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Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

Enhancing Your Skills

Lesson: Finding More Projects

5 minute read

As a new designer, you may feel self-conscious about not having as much industry experience or a large body of work right now. But the good news is you don't have to wait till after you start your ideal job to gain that experience or to expand your portfolio—you can start right now!

Essentially, embrace ongoing design work a key part of your job search strategy and professional development for your career—while you’re looking for positions that are a good fit, you can continue building your skills and adding projects to your portfolio to help you accumulate experience.

How to Find Promising Portfolio Projects

Projects that allow you to gain industry experience—such as learning how to hand off designs, communicating with developers, and taking technical constraints into account—are ones that will allow you to become more familiar with key aspects of many UX design roles.

Also, working with real clients is a huge plus since communicating about the work to other stakeholders is a crucial part of the job. The more experience you have in sharing how you’ve worked with stakeholders, the better.

Metrics / data to show success are also super helpful and compelling. Work backwards from the case studies you’ll eventually be writing: What are you designing for? What are your project goals? Will you have any metrics to showcase success? Make sure to keep these in mind before and during each project—be mindful of strategic priorities and how you’ll communicate the value of your design work.

Look to develop in areas that you and your Career Coach have identified as needing work. For example, if you’re searching for product designer roles but need to improve your UI skills, consider working on focused projects that allow you to practice UI.

When you conduct this work, feel free to utilize the capstone framework we’ve provided earlier in the course. Remember to clarify project goals up front, plan the projects thoroughly, utilize strict timelines, and make sure to communicate throughout the process.

Whatever the scenario or opportunity, choose a specific usability problem to focus on and illuminate the users' pain points. From there, show possible ways to solve their problem and include the case study in your portfolio.

Initiating a Project?

One of the best ways is to approach a business that needs your help and has a problem that you can help them solve. For instance, this might mean helping your friend with their startup or doing a pro bono project for a non-profit or local business that you care about.

Or find a developer friend who has an idea they’d like design help with! Even if you don’t love the project idea, remember that your main goal is to build experience and work with developers.

Hackathons are a fantastic way to create work under tight time and resource constraints, while working within an interdisciplinary team. You can always iterate and develop the initial work you started during the hackathon.

Capstones

Another way to build your portfolio is to develop new concepts for your own personal capstones. These are ideas that you have for solving problems you may have faced, or currently face.

These projects, while often are considered passion projects, they can help you learn how to solve different problems using your design process, and allow you to craft different project types to build out your portfolio with more examples of your capabilities.

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