Over the years I’ve received many questions from early-stage design professionals within the first 5 years of their career asking about how to find and secure UX/UI design jobs. I’d meet them at events, industry conferences, meetups, university student activities and elsewhere.
I’ve prepared this guide to answer some of the most common questions with advice that’s clear, direct and practical. That’s not to say it’s ‘easy advice’, much of it requires effort and discipline, but I’ll aim to give you the best path to achieving design job seeking success. It’s often this very effort and discipline that clearly separates the great from average job applicants.
Lastly, this guide is of my own experiences and opinions, I always suggest getting career guidance across multiple sources and experts so you can choose, adapt and make it into what best suits you. Let’s get started.
How and where can I find design jobs?
Finding a design job takes a multi-pronged approach. I wouldn’t just drop your CV into a few job sites and respond to job ads as they come – the job market simply hasn’t worked like that for quite some time. A more strategic use of job sites, social platforms, company websites and your personal network will yield a much better outcome.
Job Sites
Job sites are typically characterized as large online platforms that serve as the ‘marketplace’ of jobs, acting as a conduit between recruiters posting job vacancies and the applicants seeking jobs. Job sites can take different shapes: large national sites that cover a whole country and often cover many industries and job types; smaller more localized job sites; and lastly niche sites that are more specialized to a particular profession or industry.
Job sites should definitely play a role in your job searching strategy, but their value has really diminished over recent years. They’ve struggled to modernize and reinvent themselves, instead staying true to a dated format. Too many faux or impractical job listings that clutter out any of the genuine opportunities. People carpet bombing their CVs into anything even remotely resembling a design job. Opaque filtering mechanisms, tasked with sorting out the legit CVs end up stalling most applications before ever reaching a human. It all makes job sites feel tiring and ineffective.
However, it’s still worth finding the 3-4 best job platforms in your country, setting up a profile, keeping on top of new listings and responding to the most relevant opportunities. Additionally, there are a handful of job sites specifically for design professionals, these are highly targeted but comparatively limited in their reach and job inventory.
Networking Platforms
For professional networking platforms, LinkedIn is a must. There’s LinkedIn and then there really isn’t even a distant second place platform – they truly dominate the professional online networking space. As with job sites though, it’s suffered its own noticeable decline over recent years. Dubious job listing quality, applicant filtering concerns and the general nosedive of feed content quality and copious AI slop posts, it’s starting to smell.
But, putting all that aside, it’s still the single most important platform to be on as an IT or design professional. Due to the sheer number of people on it, over 115 million verified accounts, it really can connect you to people that can lead to work opportunities. Consider it both important as a place to find potential work, and also one that will likely be used by recruiters to check your overall vibe. From how well you’re connected, to what you’ve contributed to the industry and design community – an impression can be quickly gathered from a person’s LinkedIn profile.
Get a LinkedIn profile and take it seriously. You may not be a “social media person”, trust me I get it, but don’t skimp out on your LinkedIn profile. Do the necessary things to have a polished profile – proper headshot for your profile photo, background image, well formatted title, carefully worded about section writeup, work history and all the other relevant details. There’s endless LinkedIn profile advisors out there that share essential pro-tips on building solid LinkedIn profile.
Once you have a decent profile, start on the long journey of building your network of connections. Begin with past and current colleagues, friends, attendees and speakers at events you attend, recruiters, people you admire their work, and continue to build on your connections over time. If you have a legitimate desire to connect to someone that’s shared a useful post in the feed – there’s no harm to request to connect to them. You’re not going to get a perfect batting average of people accepting your request, but if your profile is spiffy and your connection request note makes sense to the recipient – the rate of acceptance is actually higher than you’d expect. Fellow designers are a friendly and helpful bunch.
As someone approaching the 10k follower mark, the reach to people that could potentially lead to a new job opportunity is huge. My current role is proof. But that was from a long and deliberate journey that started back when the account was set up in the early 2010’s. Yes, that’s well over a decade of grinding away, building that follower count one person at a time.
Content creators can crush that number in much less time, the field demands it and their energies are focused on follower growth. But for a typical IT professional or designer, it’s a lot tougher, and 1,000 followers is a genuinely ambitious but useful target. You could argue it’s not about quantity but quality, but in this case, both are important – the quantity of quality connections.
Build your connections, follow the pages of desirable companies and recruitment agencies, and join some of the many design related LinkedIn groups. Your feed will start to have job opportunities you simply wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise.
On the topic of online networks, Facebook Groups have many local and international design related groups that can be worth joining, particularly for junior and mid level designers. Such groups are active with regular posts by recruiters and companies genuinely needing to fill design jobs. These groups are often run by local design organizations or associations, companies, design agencies, recruiters and by enthusiastic members of the design community.
Real World Networking
While it feels like the general state of online sites and platforms has somewhat decayed, your personal real world face-to-face connections are more important and valuable than ever. The value of going to in-person local meetups, events, conferences, workshops and just hanging out with people in the design field should not be under estimated. The new people you meet can become great connections and friends, and those may lead to business and job opportunities.
In such settings, always realize it’s not just who’s in the room, but also what they’re connected to in terms of other people, opportunities, companies and so forth — then it gets quite interesting. But I must stress to you, don’t come into such events and activities with a blunt message of “I’m looking for work” to everyone. You’re there to meet people, and potentially as you get to know them, somewhere down the road they may help in your job search.
Company Websites
The website of companies you’re interested in working with almost always has a career section. Whether it’s up to date and accurate is a whole other matter. There are endless neglected career sections out there, many completely disconnected from the realities of a company’s actual hiring needs. However, check anyway, and it doesn’t hurt to also browse the company’s blog and news sections for announcements of hiring campaigns.
Should I have a design portfolio? Are they worth the effort?
A design portfolio is this magic space that you personalize however you want, to tell your story and showcase your best design works how you choose. It lets you express your individual creativity, style and capabilities, without the typical commercial constraints when designing for a third party. It can be a true reflection of you as a designer.
When you’re trying to land that perfect design job, whether you’re fresh to the field of design or a senior that’s been through it all, a portfolio is absolutely essential. Words alone simply can’t replace a well-assembled set of design samples.
The question is, what’s the best format for your portfolio, so that it’s accessible, gives you the greatest creative control and is easy to use.
As someone that’s hired my fair share of designers… UX designers, UI designers, researchers, graphic designers; I’ve poured through thousands of CVs, portfolios and LinkedIn profiles. In doing so, trends certainly start to form around what I could confidently say attracts the right and wrong attention.
In fact, thinking back to everything I’ve seen from candidates over the past couple of years, I can place the various formats on a ladder. Ranking them from the most problematic at the bottom, all the way to the top where portfolio paradise lies. And like many things in life, the effort needed increases as the effectiveness does, as we climb that ladder.
So let’s take a trip up the rungs, starting with that ‘must be discussed’ dumpster fire at the bottom…
Not Having a Portfolio
Seriously, you’d be shocked at how many designers drop the ball on including a portfolio with their design job application. They either don’t provide one, or they make it mission impossible to find it – leaving this vague crumb trail leading you to 404 errors and missing files.
It has to be said, if you don’t have even a very basic portfolio with some simple concepts and practice designs – you’re really not ready to hit the job market. Even with freshers straight out of university, many have a handful of designs from small freelance gigs, practice designs, passion projects and so on.
It’s a pretty severe omission. It looks, unprepared and gives a bad impression about your overall readiness. And when you’re lined up with 20 other designers, and they’ve got portfolios, you’ll be right at the back of that line or bounced out of it all together.
So now lets move on to greener pastures, shall we…
Cloud Storage
As someone that hires designers, the experience of getting a candidate’s link to a cloud drive (like Google Drive or Dropbox) can range anywhere from worse than not having a portfolio, to ‘acceptable’, depending on how it’s done.
In the less desirable scenarios, I’ve clicked share links that open up to a house of mirrors labyrinth with dozens of cryptically named folders and subfolders – and equally mind-boggling filenames. There’s no “readme” file in sight to guide me in the right direction. Basically, the link just dumps me into someone’s drive and its up to me to make sense of it all.
The designer knows their way around, and what to look for, it’s their bloody drive and files. For the hiring manager? It’s a patience testing trail and error exercise, hunting through and clicking image files, documents, whatever looks to be the most appropriate. And if the first few files opened aren’t fruitful, the odds of them bailing out is pretty high. Overall, “tedious” is the most apt word that comes to mind.
In the very very worse case scenario, after some clicking around, I’ve realized they’d literally just given me full blown access to all their raw customer work files… “Oh dear, I shouldn’t be seeing this. I’ll just gently close my browser window.” Truthfully, the “no portfolio” option would actually be better than this.
All of it comes across as so sloppy, unaware and inconsiderate. Particularly in the case of UX Designers, where it shows a supreme lack of empathy for the end user. You know, empathy… one of the key things a UX designer is hired for.
Some designers however, got the format right. They have a handful of projects, they created logically named folders for each, dropped descriptively named image files in the folders, included an intro HTML to help the user get their bearings – that’s very acceptable. But oddly, so exceedingly rare.
The pros of cloud storage drives are they let you handle larger files (which is a common issue with design). It’s highly accessible to anyone with the link and if structured properly, can be easy to navigate. The cons, are that it’s easily abused when the end user isn’t considered in how it’s prepared. It also doesn’t create any kind of narrative around your work experience, it’s only a collection of files, therefore the contents of the files must do all the heavy lifting.
Online Portfolio Platforms
Popular platforms like Behance and Dribbble are ultra-simple, turn-key ways to spin up a portfolio. Set up a free account, do your bio, upload your designs – bang done.
These platforms handle all the navigation, layout and functionality for displaying your designs in a simple and modern interface. They’re ideally suited to artists, graphic designers and UI designers. For UX designers however, they start to fall over because really they’re built to showcase the end product, not the process and road taken to get there.
That sweet simplicity does come with compromises… you’re basically locked-in to their pre-set themes. You’ve got very little control over the look and feel of your portfolio, so its difficult to truly make it ‘your own’.
So in that case, what lets you customize right down to the pixel?
PDF Files
PDF (or “portable document format”) files have been kicking around for decades, as in from the early 90’s. Yet it’s still got a lot going for it. Portability (as the name suggests); reliable and precise display of complex layouts, images and typography on pretty much any computer; relatively decent compression and even has some limited interactivity – all in a single file.
But why am I putting this a rung above online portfolio platforms? Well, I’ve seen some amazingly good PDF portfolios. Beautiful layouts and styling that capture the designer’s personality. The pages are usually in conventional print dimensions, so you get this vibe of flipping through a magazine of the designer’s career – it can be very satisfying.
The ability to design the content with your favorite design tool and export it out with pixel precision gives PDFs a huge edge.
The format is not without its down sides. Those file sizes can get hefty pretty quick when loaded up with high-res images. And we all know, bulky file attachments aren’t cool when needing to get past the bouncer of a recruiter’s email server. Email size limits have definitely stagnated over the years. There’s also very limited interactivity – linking is about as exciting as it gets.
So, you may ask, what sits perched at the top of that ladder?
Personal Portfolio Sites
Ah yes, the holy grail of portfolios. Hands-down nothing beats your very own portfolio website. Think of it – complete control over everything… how it looks, content, structure, what it can do – all up to you.
Does it take the most effort? Damn right it does.
Domain name registration, hosting, setting up the CMS, designing pages, writing content, getting all the functionality to actually work… the list goes on and on. But the payoff for your efforts can be huge.
It becomes this ‘hub’ of everything about you: what you’re up to, achievements, community involvement, a forum for your writings and ideas. It can be strictly work related, or add in a splash of personal content – totally your call. That being said, I’ve been genuinely intrigued by the non-work related content of portfolio sites. It adds a nice dose of substance, and reveals a whole other dimension to the person behind the designs.
The major downside is clearly the upfront and ongoing time and energy needed to get it off the ground and kept fresh. Think of the grueling process of getting your CV just right, now max that out with getting messaging and visuals across a whole website just perfect.
But if you build a kick ass portfolio site, it goes a long way in distinguishing you from other candidates. It demonstrates, if you’re given a blank slate, what you’d do with it. Serving as a barometer of how contemporary, polished, engaging, relevant, usable or unique your designs are if left to your own devices.
As long as you remember that a portfolio site works in your favor when it’s up to date and appears cared for. Neglected portfolios can work against you, resembling a career graveyard. At the very least, schedule a quarterly review of the content: what should be updated, added and pruned to keep it relevant.
Finally, there’s costs. Depending on your approach it can be very affordable, but compared to other formats, you’ll be committing to small but ongoing costs to keep the lights on. Some SaaS solutions bundle everything together like the domain, hosting and a one-click setup CMS into a single low priced package – for many this will hit the sweet spot.
As a senior level designer, a portfolio site is perfect to organize your considerable works and contributions to the design community. As a mid-level UX/UI designer you can perfectly craft how the site tells the story of your design journey. And as a junior starting out, it’s really great practice building the site from the ground up.
Concluding Thoughts
Now that we’ve climbed the ladder, I’ll leave you with a few thoughts…
These various portfolio formats can work separately or together. You can have a PDF based portfolio, stored in a cloud drive, and use an online portfolio platform for being part of the design community. The key, is that you’re presenting to recruiters a clear and consistent message across those channels about your skills and what you’ve done.
Designers transitioning from graphic design to UI, or UI to UX often appear unfocused and fragmented, because what they show in each platform or format sends different signals. Don’t let the work from your previous role drown out the work you’re doing in your current role.
And when applying for a job, make sure the portfolio speaks directly to the job’s role, and that the link or file is accessible and without any hurdles. Consider that every time there’s friction, you’re giving the recruiter a reason to jump to the next candidate.
With such tremendous global demand for designers and tons of meaty projects to be part of… it’s a great time to be a designer. Arm yourself with a kick-ass portfolio, and good luck out there!