Search online for hackathons in your area that fit your experience level. Participants range from beginners through advanced designers.
Gradually, you’ll accumulate enough experience to successfully look for full-time work or build a freelance career.
Demonstrate how you’d improve real life microcopy in your portfolio. It isn’t paid work, but employers will see what you’re capable of. Describe your improvements respectfully (you never know if the person who wrote the original is looking at your work and process). Spec work (short for “speculative work”) is creative work done for free by volunteer designers in the hopes that a company or client will hire them.
Clarify that you’re planning to document your work for a portfolio and that you’re a new professional looking for experience.
Taking courses online or at a local college helps you improve your resume and prepare for your career in the field. Your class might provide other online resources, like forums or Slack groups, where you can get feedback from other UX professionals. When soliciting feedback in class or online, make sure to courteously offer your own critiques for other people’s work too.
Since the product is fictitious, show off your graphic design experience by creating realistic items like loading pages or buttons.
Good writing is good writing, and employers want to see how your mind works and your ability to think outside the box. Many professional UX writers transition into their jobs from other writing fields.
Consider if the company wants writers for apps, websites, or other platforms. Include and highlight the most relevant samples you have to market yourself toward the perspective job opportunity.
Describe the goal and timeline of the project, plus the unique challenges or limitations you had to overcome to highlight your problem-solving skills. Narrate your writing process step by step so employers can understand the rationale behind your choices and tone. Optionally, include a few sentences about what you learned to showcase your commitment to professional growth and development.
In addition to a general process section, include your process and the outcomes for specific case studies too.
Include some personal information that gives readers a sense of who you are and what you bring to a professional environment. List your hard skills or unique work experience too, especially if it’s in a related field like marketing or engineering. [13] X Research source Remember, hard skills (like how to use a specific software) are easy to teach new employees. Soft skills are just as valuable to employers.
Supplement your contact information with online contact forms or creating an account on social networks for designers.
Send a polite email asking for a few sentences describing their experience with you. Try to ask right after you finish a project they’re happy with. [16] X Research source Think of testimonials like online reviews. They should be relatively short (2 to 3 paragraphs at the most) and highlight the most important information.
The downside to website portfolios is the cost of a domain name, host, and content management system. The cons of PDFs include the time it takes to design a portfolio from scratch and the files size limitations most online job applications have.
