Helpful advice for building out your resume.

To make the list above much more useful, we wanted to offer actionable advice on improving your UX resumes.

Your resume tells the story, not in its current existence, but in how it relates to the future. When you frame your resume, you have to curate your experiences (including the actual jobs you’ve done, as well as the responsibilities in those jobs) to the future job you’re applying to. You’ve got a lot of really great lego pieces, but now you’ve got to build towards a specific direction.

Something to remember is that the first person that will look at your resume (and portfolio!) is usually not the hiring manager. It’s the recruiter or HR professional. This means they have 7-10 seconds to glance at your work, at your experience, at the general “look and feel” of your resume to see if they can “greenlight” you to to the next round.

What does the recruiter need to see? What do you need to move on to speaking with a human?

1. Your title. Who are you? Researcher? UX designer? UI? What’s your title. This goes under your name.

2. Your relevant jobs for the job you’re applying to.

3. Actionable, well-defined job experiences, enhanced with key performance indicators, UX keywords.

Read our full advice in our handy Figma file which also includes a resume template —>

In terms of inspiration for what resumes in UX could look like, take a look at:

1. Bestfolios

Some other tools we use often at Ideate Labs:

1. Teal tool for interview tracking. This tool also helps a lot with finding keywords.

2. JobSeer : Advanced Job Search, Skills Match, Referral Finder, and Company Insights - all in one extension FREE.

3. JobScan.io : Jobscan optimizes your resume for any job, highlighting the key experience and skills recruiters need to see.

Still feeling a little stuck on the keywords you need to focus on? An exercise we encourage is to work backwards from a job you’re really love to do.

Find the perfect role, and run your resume through an ATS scanner

We are going the “backwards” approach. First, search for the perfect role on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Google, wherever you like to find jobs. Use our list of UX agencies and job boards if you need to find jobs.

When you find a job you absolutely would love to do, use a site like JobScan.co to compare your resume to the job description. By scanning your resume, you can start to see which skills you’re missing, or not effectively highlighting. Now we see what we couldn’t see before.

After learning what skills you’re missing, you have 3 paths:

1. Refine your resume to match the job description more closely. Once you do this for enough jobs, you will notice they all ask for similar things so this exercise won’t take too long.

2. Scan your memory to see if you have any experiences you can add into your resume. Look up terms like “customer experience design” and “service design” because you might be surprised that you actually have more UX experience than you realize.

3. Develop new skills. Depending on how much you still need to learn, you can either take a full course, like our 16-week course for working professionals, or you can take on projects with groups like Code for America (civic, community led projects), or even do pro-bono UX work as a volunteer on various websites. You can also start your own projects, such as this mock Apple Music project I always show our students.

Please know, we at Ideate Labs do not promote or encourage unemployed labor, and you can learn a lot conducting volunteer experiences.