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Resume & Cover Letters

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Lesson: UX Design Resumes

15 minute read
We all know how important first impressions are—and it’s especially true when it comes to the job search.
Your portfolio, resume, and cover letter are the first things a hiring manager will look at to determine if they should move forward with your application.
That’s why it’s vital to pay attention to all three documents, and make them the best they can possibly be. Your portfolio shows the work you've done in the past, your resume lists your credentials for the work you want to do in the future, and your cover letter is the sales pitch that allows you to bring everything together with confidence.
It’s important to present your resume in a way that best represents the skills and experience that you have to offer an employer.
Your resume should consist of the following areas:
Contact information
Previous employment
Education experience
A list of skills and software applications you have mastered
References
Let’s go through these one-by-one.

Contact information

While the job application you fill out may request these details, you should double check to ensure all of this information is correct. It’s very easy to overlook, and attention to detail is an important quality in any designer. Include your name, email address, postal address, phone number, LinkedIn profile URL, and any other social networks where you have a professional presence, like Twitter or Instagram.
The most important piece of your contact information should be a link to your portfolio. Place this high on the page, so it’s one of the first things they see.

Previous employment

Recruiters and hiring managers want to understand your professional background. This helps them understand who you’ve worked with, what projects you’ve completed, and your previous roles within a team.
For each job you’ve had, include the name of the company or organization, the position you held, the dates of employment, and a brief summary of your responsibilities, projects you worked on, and key results.
Wherever possible, include clickable links so that people can find out more about specific projects and review your work.

Education experience

Your educational background can be just as important as your professional experience. If you didn’t go to a university or graduate with a degree, that may not be detrimental to your candidacy for a position, so long as it’s not a strict hiring requirement of the company.
However, you can now proudly list the design education you’ve received through Designlab, so make sure to include UX Academy on your resume! For each qualification, make sure to include:
The name of the institution or school
The degree, qualification, or certificate earned
Date of completion
A brief summary of what you studied
Many designers who have gone on to great careers in the industry never studied graphic design or digital design in a formal university setting. If you have a degree in a different discipline—like journalism, pharmacy, or psychology—make sure to include it within this section.

Skills and software knowledge

While it’s not strictly essential, including a list of your skills and software knowledge can give hiring managers a high-level view of your abilities.
This list can be concise, and based around simple keywords, like:
UX design
Visual and UI design
Sketch
InVision
Feel free to include any other skills you’ve developed during your design studies. Some UX design resumes display these as bar charts showing a percentage confidence in different skills or tools. It’s best to avoid this approach, because it can create a perception that you lack knowledge in certain areas, and deter hiring managers from moving your application forward.

References

If a job application requests you provide references, you should include the following information for each person:
Name
Job title
Their current employer
An up-to-date, active phone number and/or email address to contact them
This information will help recruiters and hiring managers contact these individuals to get feedback on your ability to do the job, your work ethic, and overall suitability for their work culture.
If a job application doesn’t require references upfront, an alternative is to include the text “References available upon request”. This saves a bit of room on your resume, and invites the company to make contact.

Other information to include

If you have a list of projects that aren’t directly related to your previous work, you can also list those within your resume. Include information about your role, what client you worked with, and a list of the skills you used during the project. Be transparent about what you contributed.
They'll also want to see your work, so where possible, make it easy for them by including a link or URL to the individual projects. And wherever you have the information available to share, make sure to include the results your work contributed to—for example, if a project created a certain amount of new business, or an increase in conversion rate.

Creating your resume

When developing your resume, remember that not all job applications will allow you to upload a PDF. Some require you to enter the information into an online form, so it’s always good to have a plain-text version of your resume ready so that you can copy and paste text into form fields.
Having said that, you should take time to design your resume in a format that mimics your portfolio. Consider using the branding you’ve created for yourself on the resume. Use the same typefaces and layout styles across your portfolio, resume, and cover letter.
If you have specific colors within your portfolio, use accents of those colors in the resume. Consistency across all documents can prove that you pay attention to detail, and that your design skills can translate further than online.
However, avoid overly decorative or gimmicky elements. In particular, avoid data visualizations about skills and software knowledge. If you want to include qualitative information here, simply use terms like “beginner”, “intermediate”, and “expert”.
Above all, keep your resume concise. Almost all hiring managers in the design industry will expect you to send a one-page resume, particularly for junior roles.
The Executive Director of Design at USAA, Greg Storey, notes:
“Trying to be clever with ‘design’ will only get in the way of your objectives. Whether applying for a job or delivering client work, apply design only when and where it’s appropriate.”

Trends based on region and country

Job markets can vary from one geographic area to another. Because of this, it makes sense to adjust your approach to the resume based on your audience and location-specific expectations.
For instance, if you’re applying for a position in Europe, keep in mind that resume expectations have changed, and that all European Union (EU) countries adhere to the same criteria and format for the
“Europass CV”
⁠
.
Whenever applying to a country or region you’re unfamiliar with, take the time to research if there are any resume expectations to be aware of. If you're ever unsure, stick with more general guidelines.
Another example of geographic differences for resume expectations is the use of the phrase “Curriculum Vitae” (or “CV” for short). While “resume” and “CV” are often interchangeable in other countries, they are understood differently in the U.S., where hiring managers usually expect a resume to be no longer than a page.
In terms of whether or not to include your photo on your resume, RedStarResume offers this advice about varying country expectations: “In the UK you would never attach a photo, whereas in Germany or France you would. Many Asian countries also include pictures with their applications. In the US and Australia it is not recommended or encouraged.”

Digital resumes

In the U.S. at least, digital resumes are becoming a more common expectation. A digital resume typically just means a resume that you can link to using a URL (in addition to your LinkedIn profile!)
One of the simplest ways is to upload your resume to your website, either as a PDF or as a webpage. Depending on what platform you’ve used to build your portfolio site, you could also create a page within your content management system to include direct links and editable content. Another option is to use an online resume builder—however, these often lack personality and originality.

Highlight your current strengths

As a career changer, you already possess many transferable skills. Be sure to showcase all the strengths you bring from your previous work, and highlight any areas that you see as enhancing your abilities as a designer. For example, managing deadlines is an important part of professional design work, so if you have experience as a project manager, that could be a big advantage.
Other ways to demonstrate your skills (even if you don’t necessarily have the experience yet in a new career or industry) is to emphasize examples of your willingness and ability to learn. If you’ve participated in a hackathon, or contributed to other volunteer projects, make sure to include these engagements.
In a competitive job market, a few ways you can go the extra mile to stand out as a candidate is to show that you’ve done your research, and that you’re invested in the challenges that the company is trying to solve.

Final stamp of approval

Since recruiters, on average, will only spend about six seconds on a resume, make sure that your resume stands out for all the right reasons. Don’t let typos, grammatical errors, or formatting glitches be the thing that prevents you from moving forward.
It’s also worth checking your resume against
these common mistakes
⁠
. If in doubt, get a friend (or two) to proofread it before you hit send!

Further resources

Here are
14 bonus tips
⁠
about creating a UX design resume! (Designlab Blog)
Get layout inspiration in the
Resumes section of Bestfolios
⁠
⁠
⁠
Check out 10 resumes
⁠
that got designers jobs at Google (Medium)
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