Are you wasting time in a UX Bootcamp?
Answering a message from a mentee about whether their UX bootcamp was worth it.
I want to share a message I received and the response I sent because I think the worry is there for many folks who have invested in a bootcamp.
“Hi Maigen, hope you're having a great Friday, Jr. so far! I wanted to show you a message from a UX recruiter on LI (see below) - I was wondering what your thoughts are on it. It makes me nervous to think that I might be wasting my time with my UX bootcamp, but it also has me asking myself how can I become a great UX designer? It seems impossible these days to find a junior-level UX job before I can build up any skills to become a proficient UX designer. Hoping we can make some time to chat about this - thanks!”
This is the post in question, and the responding UX recruiter’s comment is here:
Here is my response:
This is totally one of the problems I see, too, and it’s why I think apprenticeships are the next thing that will change the industry in a major way.
There is incredible value in bootcamps. They compress a ton of knowledge and exposure into a short period of time. There’s no way to get that breadth of knowledge and exposure without having a design job with a mentor, and even then it’s impossible to be exposed to all of the methods and techniques in a reasonable amount of time. In my opinion, the bootcamp education you’ve signed up for is not a waste.
Granted, the exposure is limited and surrounded by other new exposure experiences, which does have the effect of dampening how much understanding can really be assimilated. This was my experience going through a full-stack development bootcamp as well.
I think the true underlying goal of the bootcamp is to give you the ability to recognize keywords and topics enough to google more information and continue growing because they know they can only cram so much in your brain.
As I’m writing the new bootcamp curriculum for my company, there is so much information I want to add, but student feedback and learning science has told us that we have to strike a balance between too little and too much information. We have to trust that the students realize that this is a shortcut to a four-year degree’s worth of knowledge and that the students are committed enough to their learning experience to practice and learn long after the bootcamp is over.
The problem is that some folks will think that the bootcamp education is all they need to go out and be successful as a UX designer.
They come out of the gate cocky but inexperienced in real world situations. They make decisions based on the limited experience they have and believe those decisions to be the right decisions.
They lack the ability to be self-critical about their skills and are not humble enough to recognize they need to seek out more information rather than think they know it all. Many people are not self-aware enough to realize that decision-making skills get honed with practice and that most designers throw away more work than they end up using because they invest in their practice.
Good judgement, and therefore good design skill, comes from practice, testing, and learning by using real data and working with real humans. An apprenticeship project is a real-world project that will be researched and designed, tested with users, iterated on and refined over time. This is something that does look good to hiring managers.
From these projects, you’ll have metrics and data and information that backs up your design decisions, and working with me to confirm your decisions gives you the freedom to make mistakes with guardrails.
You’ll work with other folks and it won’t always be easy. You’ll learn about how to deal with conflict in a safe but realistic environment. All of this will provide you with real, personally-lived-experience answers to the kinds of questions hiring managers ask in interviews to discover if you’re ready to be a contributing member of their team.
The short projects completed in the bootcamp are a mere taste of the real work. I like to call them the “amuse-bouche” that starts the 7-course meal.
To continue the meal metaphor, they are meant to whet the appetite but are not capable of delivering the full sensory experience of a deeply satisfying and well-prepared meal.
Twisting that analogy back to a bigger theme: That well-prepared meal is only possible because of the years of experience the chef has. The end result differences between the meals from two chefs — a just-out-of-culinary-school and a chef with two to five years of experience — will be very different in nuanced but noticeable ways.
The food/chef metaphor doesn’t account for innate talent, sure, but even raw genius can only be honed to perfection over practice and feedback iterations. I feel like this can apply to any job or skill, too.
Nothing will replace the experience of working with a client and a team in the real world. Even the experience of an apprenticeship is only a start. The process we teach in bootcamps is an idealized version of the design process - the real world is much more complex because of deadlines, budget, expectations, and people. I like to say that “everything is fine, until people.” The experience you get working on projects in an apprenticeship that last longer than a few weeks and actually get in front of users is experience that hiring managers value and look for.
One of the more complex parts of working in the real world is the experience of working with people, coming to agreements, dealing with personalities and expectations that don’t align. This is the most exhausting part, in my personal experience. These ‘soft skills’ are essential and can only be truly understood and developed in a real world environment.
Many bootcamp students lack business experience and technology industry exposure, so they essentially enter the field like a bull in a china shop - they don’t really know how to carry themselves, behave and speak - and bringing someone onto a team that needs that kind of training can directly impact a businesses bottom line in terms of lost efficiency and potential workplace drama.
The other major complex part is just practice. Practice making decisions that don’t work and making decisions that do work and processing enough information about both to know why they do or do not work.
Critical thinking is the most difficult part of the job but it’s at the very heart of what it means to be a UX designer. Most people have no experience with critical thinking and have never been challenged to improve their critical thinking skills.
Both of these complex parts - soft skills and critical thinking skills - are probably more important than the knowledge you get in the bootcamp. This is what I think the hiring manager in the message you shared with me is speaking to. If someone has no real world experience with these two things, they’re only 1/3 effective in their role as a designer, and therefore not worth hiring in most hiring manager’s eyes.
I welcome your thoughts, and I would love to have you join me over at the UX Social Club!
xox
Maigen
