I wasn’t getting many bites on my job applications, so I did a competitive analysis on my portfolio
Not too long ago I wrote a short article on the perils of finding a job as a UX Designer. One of the recent steps I took was to attend mentorship sessions to get a sense of maybe why this was the case. It was then where I discovered my portfolio might not be as strong as I thought.
💁🏻♀️ Before going into what I found, here’s a little bit of a background about me. I was a Speech-Language Pathologist for 5–6 years before making a transition to UX Design. I started off with doing some self-studying through YouTube and Coursera, and read a bunch of articles on Medium. I even tried out a designathon with a friend. I then came across BrainStation’s bootcamp program and, long story short, I enrolled in the program and got a diploma in UX Design. Yes — I am one of those career-switcher, bootcamp people but I don’t regret any second of it…for the most part.
📓 Going back to my portfolio, this was the reason why my case studies looked similar to other bootcamp grads. I valued my time at BrainStation immensely and would not do anything differently, but we were taught to write our case studies a certain way. To be fair, I think students need this amount of guidance because we need to learn. But since being out of school, I was forced to critically assess why I wasn’t getting contacted back for interviews as much as I’d hoped. During my ADPList mentorship session with Summer Zhang, she gave me a list of great portfolios and suggested I take a look at them to compare with my own.
So that’s what I did, and here’s what I found:
All portfolios that stood out were different
I thought I could compare and contrast and implement a “checklist” of features but it wasn’t that simple. Everybody’s portfolios were actually pretty different so it wasn’t as easy as “all these designers have this feature so I need to add it to mine”. Instead, I came up with a list of principles that good portfolios have that I will be adding to mine:
✏️ Make your hero/headline catchy and unique to you. Try not to use “buzzwords” if you can. — Thankfully I was aware of this point when I first created my portfolio so it was something I did not have to worry about as much.
✏️ See if you can add sections to your portfolio that show what else you bring to the design community. — For example, do you draw/illustrate? Add those to your portfolio! Have you won awards, spoken on podcasts? created YouTube videos or TikToks? Add those to your portfolio! Have you written articles? Add those… you get the point. For myself, I’m planning on writing more Medium articles to document my journey but also to hopefully help those of you who are in the same boat as me. I will be adding them to my portfolio.
✏️ Make sure your case studies are written to be uniquely you. — This one is tricky because what does that even mean? I am someone who appreciates a concrete outline of what I should include. However, this is the biggest barrier for me. Because I came out of a bootcamp, my case studies were all written very similarly. The advice I’ve been getting is that you need to think about your problem space, your solution, and what you think is important to include to tell the story. If you’re not sure, take a look at other portfolios and critically assess your own case studies to determine what to include. In general, it seems like the main points to include are:
- The product name and clear image
- Background of the product
- Your role and tasks completed
- The problem and solutions from user research findings
- User testing & results
- The final design
- The outcome
- Takeaways/next steps
But that’s not the end. Once you’ve written a case study, get some feedback and iterate based on that. I know I will!
🙏🏼 I hope this was helpful for those of you who are feeling stuck with job hunting and don’t know what to do next. As a last tool for you, here are some resources I found helpful to improve my own portfolio.
