Transferring Skills to a UX/UI Design Career

Making a career change can be stressful, especially if you feel like your current skill set isn’t transferable to where you want to be. For UX design, you might be surprised at how many skills cross over to surprising fields, anything between graphic design to even nursing! In this article, we will explain how your skills can be useful within UX/UI design and help you pinpoint your areas of strengths and weaknesses.

1. How can I transfer graphic design skills to UX?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, UX designers share a lot of skills with graphic design. The two fields are often confused for each other, and while there can at times be similar goals, they are separate. Graphic designers hold strengths in soft skills such as emotional understanding and communication, but they also tend to know similar design tools used in UX design. Graphic designers are also great at understanding aesthetics in their design. These skills are all valuable in becoming a great UX designer!

2. How can I transfer teaching skills to UX?

Become a teacher and realize that it might not be the right career choice? No fear! There are surprisingly a lot of shared skills between UX design and teaching that you can build on from your previous teaching experience. Teachers spend a lot of time learning and developing empathy, along with strong listening and communication skills. As a teacher, you also learn important information organizational skills, which is crucial in becoming a good UX designer. Lastly, teachers are creative and are able to give presentations, enabling them with other abilities needed to be a UX designer.

3. How can I transfer nursing skills to UX?

We all know nurses are highly skilled individuals, but did you know they hold skills to be great UX designers? Outside of their highly technical gift, nurses are excellent communicators, something that is crucial in being a UX/UI designer. Nurses also possess time management and empathy, needed for UX designers to complete project tasks on time while still keeping the end user in mind. Lastly, nurses are great researchers, which UX designers must research in order to understand their users.

4. Can I transfer other career skills to UX?

There’s an endless list of transferable skills between other careers and UX designers; however, some have a more fluid transition than others. Popular related fields include copywriters, editors, and advertisers. Copy writers hold strong writing and editing skills, needed especially for UX writers. Editors also hold those same strong written skills, along with communication as well to get their editing ideas across correctly. Advertisers are required to hold solid design and aesthetic skills, while also targeting and understanding the user of their product. As you can see, these skills make a UX designer great.

All careers have specific skills needed to be successful, but sometimes you can find overlapping requirements between two careers. Making that switch is a difficult decision, so if you need help determining if you have the right skill set for UX design, schedule a mentorship call today! We can help inform you of what transferable skills you might have and how we can help you fill the gaps within missing skills!