My career pivot into UX research
Recently I’ve had a few different conversations with folks in my wider network about career pivots. I’ve been a UX researcher at a tech scale-up for nearly two years now but before that, I spent almost a decade carefully crafting a completely different career in humanitarian aid. Making a major change to a career you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into is tough. There are a lot of questions, a lot of uncertainty, and it’s often difficult to even know where to begin. But it is possible and, more than that, it is worth it. So if you woke up one morning knowing in your gut that whatever you do now is just not it, this post is for you.
Between my realising that I needed to change careers and actually making that change lay several years of curious fumbling about mixed with strategic action. It’s impossible to document all the small learnings, micro pivots, aha! moments and happy accidents that made this transition possible. But with the benefit of hindsight, I’ve summarised the four main things I did that helped me the most along the way.
1. I examined what kind of work I actually liked.
Now, I don’t mean brainstorming job titles. What I’m talking about is taking a close look at the actual tasks and activities we engage in on a daily basis.
Take UX research, for example. UX researcher is merely a job title. The actual work is in connecting with and talking to strangers on a regular basis, analysing a ton of data and making sense of it all, unpacking and simplifying complex themes for different audiences, telling effective and impactful stories, translating research findings into actionable insights for your stakeholders, understanding and explaining what your findings mean for the business, and so forth.
That is how granular I had to get to really figure out what I liked and disliked doing with my time. I thought back to all the past projects I’d done and examined (1) what exactly happened, (2) which aspects of these projects I liked or disliked and (3) why.
This was an important first step because it helped me understand what kind of work I wanted to do more of — and why exactly I wasn’t happy doing what I did back then. It allowed me to figure out what really fed my curiosity and got me excited about work.
2. I made peace with sunk costs.
When I started this professional soul searching, I was still paying off my very expensive US bachelor’s degree. I also was just a couple of years out of graduate school — a free but lengthy commitment that cost me two whole years. In other words, I’d put a huge amount of effort, time and money into building a career I no longer wanted. That was a hard pill to swallow.
I first learned about sunk costs in relation to past achievements and current aspirations from Seth Godin’s podcast Akimbo. Godin frames sunk costs as a gift from our former selves. Here’s what he writes about this in a recent blog post:
Just because you have a law degree, a travel agency or the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic doesn’t mean that your future self is obligated to accept that gift.
To put it bluntly, framing my competencies and experiences in these terms changed everything. Learning to detach from my sunk costs, while also seeing those years of effort and experience as part of what made me unique, gave me a green light to go ahead and experiment with abandon. Everything I’d learned and achieved mattered, sure, but it didn’t dictate what I did next.
3. I self-educated (on a budget).
Eventually, I figured out that design could be a field that would tick a lot of boxes for me. I deliberately say ‘design’ here because, at that point, I didn’t actually know all that much about this field, what kind of opportunities it had, or how my own skills (mostly research and project management) could fit in here.
So naturally, I did more research.
I read widely on the subject. I went to meetups, conferences and events. I took every free design workshop and course I could get my eyes on (General Assembly and Acumen definitely deserve a mention here). In other words, I did everything I could to learn more about the field and make sense of how my skills could translate to the design world.
4. I made small but strategic interim moves
Coincidentally, around the same time, I was also tasked with writing a case study on the application of design principles in humanitarian projects, which meant I got to interview innovation and design practitioners and dig even deeper into the subject. By the time I was wrapping up that case study, I had a good enough understanding of the design field to know that I wanted to get into it and try it out for myself. Learning about design was no longer enough — I needed to get some actual practical experience.
This was the hardest part.
In the end, it was through a bit of good timing and a bit of good luck that I found a way in. A tiny design consultancy that I profiled for my case study was looking for a design researcher with experience in humanitarian aid. They needed someone who knew a lot about the aid sector. I needed somewhere I could get practical experience in design. It was a classic win-win situation.
That role turned out to be perfect as an interim move for two main reasons.
Firstly, when I started it and for a long while after, I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to do in the design field. I was equally drawn to product design, service design and user research. To be honest, I was just eager to learn more about everything. And, due to the nature of the projects I worked on and the small size of the team at that agency, I got a chance to try my hand at everything. As a result, I was able to make a more informed decision about the direction I wanted to go in when it was time to move on.
Secondly, making this interim move reduced the risk of my experiment. I didn’t have to burn all my bridges all at once. In fact, I remained closely involved in the humanitarian aid sector through the projects I worked on at the agency (which, in the end, only strengthened my resolve to leave, but that’s a different story). Carving out this safe space for myself to experiment and learn while still leaving room to abort the mission was instrumental to me taking the full plunge once I felt ready to do so.
As I mentioned at the start, pivoting my career to UX research involved far too many learnings to summarise in a single post. One key thing that I did realise in the process is that all the rules we think exist when it comes to careers and professional growth are made up. The big secret is that there are no rules. Everyone makes it up as they go along. And that’s great because it means that any career pivot that you do dream up is possible.
Get clear on how you want to spend your days, learn everything you can about the field you’re interested in, and then slowly, bit-by-bit — dare I say, iteratively — make the move.
The most exciting and fulfilling career paths are never, ever linear.
