Marketing to UX-Lessons learnt as a career changer
I decided to change my career to UX during the 2020 pandemic. By that time, I was already 4 years within my marketing career, ranging in areas such as advertising and design, revenue management and product management.
However, I felt like I didn’t want to progress into a marketing manager or specialist role at that time but felt like I was missing the problem solving and entrepreneurial skills that I have always wanted to hone in on that was so prominent in UX.
When I decided to transition to the field of UX, my first thought was that I wasn’t good enough due to my training not focusing on a graphic design background and feeling like a failure, as it is was a horizontal change rather than a vertical one.
But when furthering my research, I realised that most people who have entered the field of UX have a variety of different backgrounds with years of experience in other fields that could attribute to the role; nurses, photographers, taxi drivers to note a few.
Below is a graph of the top fields that transitioned to UX:
As you can see, only around 17% of career changes come from a graphic design background. The rest come from other career areas.
As time went on, I realised that my experience is my superpower. There are a lot of similarities between the two that means that the roles are not to dissimilar and could make me stand out as a candidate.
Here are the experiences I could bring over from marketing:
· Customer journey mapping. From my experience of working with marketing campaigns, I could understand where the entry points were and tailor campaigns to this. UX is no different as when creating a new design or changes, you must understand where the user is in a particular journey and how they came to your site.
· Learnt about how my actions relate back to the business goals, using metrics and measuring the effects of changes relating back to this.
· Understanding the company’s revenue. This is incredibly important for design as you need to know how your changes could affect the bottom line.
· An understanding of customer behaviour through analytics tools. Particularly within my last Marketing role at Air France KLM, part of my role was to analysis the different demographics within the UK market and understand their buying behaviours against competitors.
· My understanding of sociology and how group behaviours effect how to target campaigns to them.
· My competitor and market research skills and helping to gain empathy surrounding the customer.
Nevertheless, there were some personality traits that I had to re-evaluate, such as dropping my ego. In marketing, your encouraged to have an ego but in UX this holds detrimental to success whereby you are learning and growing with others, with no-one having the correct answer at first.
As a takeaway from this experience and those of you who have been in a similar situation, my advice would be the following:
· Review the soft skills that can be transferrable to UX. For example, problem solving, communication, business skills and team building skills. Often these are overlooked for the hard skills, such as design and which tools are used. Hard skills can easily be trained; soft skills are harder to develop!
· Understand why you want to make the move to UX from your previous role. For example, my reasoning was to have more exposure to being entrepreneurial whilst building solutions that meeting the need of the user. By having a “why” in the back of your mind, it can help with career growth in this field and give you motivation to keep going when you feel like you want to give up.
· Don’t worry so much about the skills you feel are lacking in this field. There are plenty of courses, often free, where you can upskill on this. My advice would be to learn one or two skills (max) at a time and break it down into small chunks. For example, my skillset that I’m currently improving on is my interaction and graphic design skills. This has been done through reaching out to potential mentors who are more experienced than me and spending 1 hour a day to learn these skills through daily challenges.
If you’re interested in receiving mentorship from me, whether it’s for a one-off call or for short-term or long-term membership in UX Design, feel free to book a 30-minute consultation with me through my Calendly link. I look forward to helping you grow in your UX Design career!
