I’m a User Experience BootCamp Graduate and Here’s Why You Should Hire Us

Let me tell you a little secret: breaking into a creative, tech driven field is very, very difficult. If you’ve ever done it, it can feel impossible most days. Or weeks. Or months.

There is a certain level of imposter syndrome that comes along when you get out of intensive training. One day, you’re making wireframes, listening to lectures, watching hour long youtube tutorials on how to use a vector design tool, and the next you are suddenly smaller than you have ever been before.

But that shouldn’t stop you from remembering: you know what you know. You know that you worked hard. You know that you spent countless late nights, weekends, working on real life client projects that you presented.

Driving the ux process into products and pitches. Learning and learning and iterating and iterating until you found a solution.

After all ux is that: finding tangible solutions to problems both seen and unseen.

You can explain your personal design process backwards and forwards.

And somehow, when you put it all day on paper and attached portfolio links to job posters, it feels like you have zero idea what you are doing.

Let me just say, real quick, that this is not, but any means, a real thing.

You are changing! You took a huge leap making a career transition! No matter what you background or skill set, you have to remind yourself over and over again that you are not just a product of your education.

Say it with me, all together: You are 1000 percent a user experience designer. You are no longer in training. You are no longer a student.

You are a proven designer. You know not just the basics of design thinking, but you are, in fact, exactly what your LinkedIn headline says you are.

However, the real question that is on my mind: why should companies hire bootcamp graduates?! Why, when there are ux designers with years and years of experience, agency, freelance, and otherwise.

In the simplest of terms, bootcamp graduates have one really amazing trait to offer.

We have nowhere to go but up. We are only starting to do half of what we will do. We are only going to get better from here. We just need to be given a chance.

We are driven, creative, green designers who are so hungry that we will push with everything we have for someone to give us a chance.

And really, what do we have to lose?! Believe it or not, bootcamps do a really amazing job of making sure that students, as designers, have the ability to adapt and change and work through day to day challenges.

Which means that as user experience designers, we have hard and soft skills that match the needs of countless companies and organizations in every field. We have already gone through the design process with ourselves, as people.

And we know that this is where we want to be, otherwise, we all would have stayed where we were before.

The bottom line is this: UX grads have to start somewhere. And the passion, the drive, and the resilience behind students who bring more than a degree to the table, that's something that cannot be mimicked and shouldn’t be looked over.

Bootcamps are a intrical piece and part of the future of tech and stem education. User centered design can only be learned in a classroom for so long.

At some point, we all have to go into the real world and work on products and within teams that see the value in not what we look like on paper, but what we can put onto paper.

Our future, and the future of design, looks brighter than ever.