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The Three Questions Junior UX Designers Can’t Answer
I recently started doing contract UX work for a company based out of Chicago. In our first conversation, the principal designer told me how happy she was to have another designer on the team. When I asked how long she’d been looking to hire, she told me five months.
“Was this position only open for seniors?”
“Actually, we really wanted to hire a junior.”
It seems like you can’t scroll through YouTube, Medium, or LinkedIn nowadays without finding an article talking about how the UX market is devastatingly saturated, how every UX bootcamp grad is going to end up under a bridge with a bindle cooking soup in a bean can, how what was a severely understaffed market two years ago is now so saturated with junior designers that no one can find work.
This really isn’t the case at all. The problem is that Junior UX designers know the buzzwords, the terminology, and a bit about the software they’re using, but they have no idea what it means to be in tech. They don’t understand how to break into the industry.
And can you blame them? How could they know? The Great Resignation has also been the Great Upskill, where people realize they aren’t happy working for low pay and less fulfillment and instead decided to stride out into the desert with a gun on their hip and…
