How to plan towards your UX career goals
I’ve reached a stage in my UX career where I’m starting to plan where I want to go within the next 1,2 and 5 years.
With a bit of research, reviewing what I enjoy doing now in my current role and how it relates to my other goals, I’m looking to focus more within the direction of a UX Strategy based role. This is down to my interest in planning and problem solving within a product based scenario; something that brings out my interest in entrepreneurialism.
Although it has been fun to explore the next steps within my career life, I wanted to guide those of you who are going through a similar experience. Here are my top five tips for this:
- Have an end in mind and work backwards
Research what kind of UX role you would like to be in next. This is only a question you can answer.
It will depend on whether you want to go down a specialist role (i.e Do you enjoy working with people and planning? Then look into a UX Strategy based role.) or a leadership or management role. (I.e Do you enjoy the design and research element? Then focus on a UX or Product Designer role.)
For this exercise, you might want to create a mindmap that can provide an insight into the direction and goals you may want to take. The core purpose is to help work out elements you enjoy at the moment within your UX career path and define where you can imagine yourself being. Then work backwards in terms of understanding what you need to learn and experience to get there.
2. Set SMART Goals
It is important to have an end in mind when you want to create your UX career goals, and a goal statement through frameworks like SMART objectives can help to define a plan and strategy for this.
SMART stands for:
- Specific: What do you want to achieve and why it’s important to you?
- Measurable: How will you know when you’ve reached your goal?
- Achievable: What actions will you take towards reaching your goal?
- Realistic: How are you going to make sure your goal can be reached?
- Time-bound: How long do you want to work on your goal?
For example, my SMART goal for my UX career path is the following:
“Get promoted to a UX strategist role that provides more responsibility of combining business decision making responsibilities with defining UX based projects fit for the organisation within the next 12 months. This will be done through getting involved more with business goals meetings and learning more about business strategy.”
Remember to start small with these goals and continually revisit them to ensure what actions you’re taking regularly align with this goal.
3. Create a Personal Development Plan
Taking into account your SMART goals and end goal plan, define what skills you need to learn to get there, whether that’s soft skills (like presentation skills) or hard skills (like wireframing).
I’ve written in a previous article about how to create a Personal Development Plan (please click here for more details).
Within your plan, define 5–6 skills you want to learn, who you need to reach to for help and define tasks and actions you can take on a regular basis. Remember to invest in yourself when developing your career in UX. Whether that’s attending conferences, courses or outreaching to fellow UXer’s for advice, be proactive and set aside a set amount of time per week for your development.
4. Find a UX Mentor or Coach
Finding a UX mentor has been a massive blessing within my UX career path and helping to pursue more within this field. Try to outreach to other UXer’s who might be 1–2 steps ahead of you and ask for their advice on actions you can take towards your goals.
If you’re looking for advice to find out more about finding a UX mentor, here is an article I wrote recently about my experiences and learnings.
5. Log your progress
It can be easy to take action towards your goals, but harder to reflect on the progress made within your UX career. Remember to set aside 1 hour a week to write down 2–3 actions you have taken towards your goals, what could be improved (i.e improvement on the task) and 2–3 goals for the upcoming week.
By reflecting on these five points above, it can help you to define and plan where you want to go within your UX career. Remember that this is an incremental process and always reflect frequently on your progress with these goals.
