Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

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Career Services in Coda! [Katie Rivard]

Career Services Orientation

Lesson: Getting The Most Out of Career Services

10 minute read

Congratulations, UX Academy graduate! You should be very proud of the hard work you've put in over the last few months. We're excited to welcome you now to Career Services!

What is Career Services?

Let's not beat around the bush. We know the job search is not always an easy journey. This process takes hard work, focus, and consistency. But many Designlab alumni have made it to the other side, and we believe you can too!

In Career Services, we're here to support you with the program you need to find a job in UX and UI design. This means over the next 26 weeks, you'll have access to a resource library, career coaching sessions, a job application tracking tool, and our community of alumni, mentors, students, and Designlab staff.

About this phase

Unlike Phases 1 and 2 of UX Academy, the content in Career Services is curated like a handbook rather than a linear curriculum to follow.

Just like how a sailboat operates differently from a car, your needs and experiences will be different from another student, meaning that the guidance and support you need will also be unique. We kept this top of mind as we produced and curated these course materials.

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Illustration showing people on paper sailboats going different directions.

Your career goals, previous experience, and needs make you a distinct candidate, so the way you utilize the resources here should be flexible. Access them when you need them. There are collections of lessons and guides dedicated to interviewing, presenting case studies, refining your resume, and much more.

Maximizing this course

Once you've completed this orientation, the order in which you use different sections of the curriculum will be determined by what you and your coach deem you need.

Be proactive with the skills you will need to enhance, but focus on where you are in the journey as well. For example, if you're still writing your cover letters, you don't need to look at the salary negotiations section.

Don't forget that you'll also have lifetime access to all UX Academy and Career Services course materials! You can continue to refer to these resources in the future.

What's expected of you

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Chart showing four expectations of students in Career Services: creating and revisiting your action plan with your career coach, tracking your job search in Huntr, enhancing your skills, and expanding your network.

Every week, you will be expected to engage with the relevant course materials, meet with your career coach, polish your application materials, and apply for jobs.

These are the

minimum activity requirements⁠

for you to remain in Career Services.

However, the reality is it takes more than that to make a career change. This is what you'll likely be doing on a weekly basis for a successful job search:

Creating and revisiting your action plan with your career coach: Recalibrating with your career coach throughout your search based on feedback and your own learnings will help you progress. There will be more on creating a job search strategy in an upcoming how-to guide.

Tracking your job search in Huntr: Saving 10 job postings and applying to at least 5 jobs a week will help you keep momentum.

Enhancing your skills: Working through the lessons and projects in the curriculum to ensure you are equipped for interviews, the job application process, and beyond.

Expanding your network: Reaching out to alums working in design, designers doing work you're interested in, and individuals in adjacent fields (like product management or front-end development) to get your foot in the door and deepen your understanding of the field. This should be something you do weekly or biweekly. More information on networking can be found in this knowledge collection.

Getting Familiar with Huntr

Huntr is an easy-to-use tool we provide for all Career Services students to keep the job search organized. This web app enables you to log jobs you’re interested in, see them in a personalized board, and track the progress of each application.

The primary feature you'll be utilizing in Huntr is your Job Board. This is where you will track the jobs you're interested in, have applied to, your networking efforts, and which stages your applications are in. You will share your board with your career coach so that they can offer you relevant and meaningful guidance.

⁠

The Job Board page in Huntr with multiple job opportunities saved across several columns.

Other parts of the tool that you'll use include Goals, which helps you keep track of the activities you'll need to complete every week, and the Job Portal, where Designlab staff adds job postings regularly to supplement your own research.

Why Huntr?

It can take hundreds of job applications to land a role. Managing and keeping track of your efforts can become extremely overwhelming, as you have to balance those applications, networking opportunities, and acing your interviews.

Think of your job search as another design project. You need tools for specific aspects of your work. Huntr is just another tool; its purpose is to help you keep all these moving pieces in order. It is simple and straightforward to use, which is just what you need so you can direct your attention toward more important tasks like refining your cover letters or preparing for interviews.

Getting Started with Huntr

Every student who graduates UX Academy and continues on to Career Services gets access to Huntr and receives an invitation to it on launch day. Once you've opened your email invite to set up your account, you'll be able to dive into your job tracking board, weekly goals, and research open positions. Huntr comes with a handy Chrome extension; download that to make saving job opportunities even easier.

If by any chance you missed this invitation email, please don't hesitate to reach out to our Customer Experience team, who can help ensure you gain access.

Career Coaching

Personalized support from a professional designer doesn’t end once you graduate from UX Academy. You’re assigned a career coach who has vetted experience working with and hiring designers. There are, however, some differences between the support you received from your mentor and what you’ll get from your career coach.

During UX Academy, your mentor was there to guide you through a sequential list of activities to develop your design skills. While your career coach can still aid you in skill-building, their main goal is to help you land a job. To help you land a job, you’ll both focus less on the course materials and more on whatever needs you have that day or week.

Your career coach will help you uncover your ideal career trajectory within design. This may involve them asking you big questions about your career goals, life ambitions, and what you value. Once you have clarity about what you want to achieve, they will act as a collaborative partner in troubleshooting whatever comes your way. Again, based entirely on your “needs,” your weekly 30-minute sessions may be used for strategizing and setting goals for the week, doing mock interviews, networking, creating application materials, reworking aspects of your portfolio, or understanding the current work environment for designers.

Meet some of our coaches

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Poyi is a product designer with a background in graphic design. He has worked with various startups and companies in the Bay Area to define design strategy and tackle usability challenges to deliver product designs that meet both business and user needs.

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Faith is a UX manager with 12+ years of design experience. She has a background in industrial design and spent two years working internationally in Singapore and Beijing, China. Her experience designing for global consumer markets include companies such as Estee Lauder, Motorola, Dell, Rosetta Stone and iRobot.

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Hugh is a design interdisciplinarian spanning education and technology (UI/UX design, graphic design, brand development, product/service design). He is based in Toronto and specializes in the Human-Centred Design methodology and research, product management, and business operations architecture.

Preparing for coaching sessions

Just like in UX Academy, coaching sessions are student-led, meaning that you should come prepared with questions and topics that you'd like to cover.

Take the first few weeks in Career Services to set yourself up for applying to roles. In your first session with your coach, get to know one another and share your background, transferable skills, and goals. Work with them to identify what sets you apart as a candidate and then craft that into your story while also making sure your application materials are ready.

Some questions you might ask your coach in your first session include the following:

Based on what I've shared about my background and goals, how can I better tell my story in an application process?

While we have a minimum application/week requirement, what are the best ways I can search for roles I'm interested in based on your experience?

How can I set myself up for success when it comes to networking?

By week three and beyond, you should be in the rhythm of applying to at least five openings weekly, and you can prepare for sessions by bringing questions or concerns in specific areas you have for the coming week. Feel free to utilize the lesson topics in this course as themes for your coaching sessions.

Working with your Career Coach dos and don'ts

😀 Do:

Meet with your career coach consistently

Share your job search activities from the previous week during sessions

Check in with them regularly about your needs and progress

Come to sessions prepared with different topics and questions

🙁 Don't:

Expect them to offer you their connections or opportunities in your local area

Feel that you can only meet with them if you have job search updates

Accessing Community

The job search is an individual journey, and we know it might sometimes feel lonely. You can rest assured that in addition to your career coach and us, you have a community of other students in the same process, and alumni who have made it to the other side. To mitigate loneliness, lean on this community you can access via Discord.

On Discord, you’ll find tons of resources shared by job seekers like yourself, networking opportunities with UX Academy alumni, and fellow graduates to do mock interviews or side projects with. On top of that, we now offer weekly Career Services Peer Sessions where you can meet with other graduates to workshop your job application materials and discuss challenges, successes, and learnings.

Don't forget that you have lifetime access to Discord so that you can continue leveraging our community's support at any point.

Here are some helpful channels in Discord you can start engaging with:

#CS-peer-sessions - find out about upcoming peer sessions

#CS-request-feedback - request feedback on anything related to your job search

#networking - partake in discussions about networking

#junior-to-mid-level - find listings for junior roles and opportunities

#i-got-the-job - for inspiration from students who have landed a role!

You can do this!

By completing UX Academy, you’ve already proven to have two vital characteristics: creativity and grit. It doesn't matter whether you were a full-time or part-time student; building up your UX and UI design skills and then creating a portfolio with multiple case studies is a rigorous process. Along the way, you likely had moments of doubt, and like everyone else, you probably made a fair number of mistakes.

The job hunt will be no different. It may be challenging, but like before, Designlab is here to support you with more resources, guidance, and a community to lean on. And remember, failure is not a permanent condition. We have every bit of faith in you that you can overcome those times when you don’t get a call-back or an interview doesn’t go well. Stay strong and believe in yourself.

We can't wait to see how you bring your unique experience and background to your new career in design. We wish you the very best!

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