User interaction designer skills for your resume and career

Mainly from the transition of so many companies working partially or fully remotely, Miro, Zoom/Microsoft Teams, and Figma are the most prevalent technical skills for UX designers. Adobe Creative Cloud, WordPress, Marvel, Webflow, User Testing, Google Forms, Sketch, and Microsoft 365 are other essential software and platforms.

There are many do's and don'ts to resumes. However, gone are the days of making an ornate graphical resume for a UX job. I also inform students that they don't have to put everything and cram it into one page. Sometimes students have a lot of experience, and they want to share that on their resume. Students need to have an overview that summarizes their skills, education, and knowledge and then provide an additional CV that details their expertise or leads the employer to their website with that information.

There are several areas that are "hot" right now, such as the previously-mentioned data science, artificial intelligence, and systems, but also cybersecurity and databases/data warehousing. That being said, the most important thing for a new graduate seeking employment to do is just to do anything, produce something. Tech employers don't and have never trusted computer science credentialing; that mistrust is the origin of the infamous "tech interview," used to verify whether a candidate actually has the technical skills to back up their piece of paper.

So to preemptively answer that question and get a leg up on other candidates, graduates should be sure to generate some artifact(s) that demonstrate(s) their technical and organizational skills. Show them that you can plan a project, design it, see it through in programming it, and do so in a responsible, organized manner (good coding style, readable code, well-documented, and using proper version control), and you'll have addressed your future employer's greatest worries right off the bat.

If it's a project in one of these "hot" areas or specifically tuned for the work the employer does, all the better, but anything the employer is doing is probably leagues beyond what a fresh graduate can do by themselves in a few months, so ultimately they're not going to be that impressed with your domain-specific technical knowledge. Instead treat it more as an opportunity to show off your "soft" skills, your programming maturity, and your ability to actually produce a product rather than just answer exam questions. And while you're at it, you might as well make it something fun for yourself so you'll be driven to finish it.

Most young graduates want to be game developers. Frankly, there are too few jobs in game development for students to find a reasonable change. The skills employers want are in using SQL with relational databases, and they want the ability to work in a full stack development environment and the willingness to learn new platforms and programming environments. The employer has a huge investment in their development stack, and the new employee has to learn that stack. Also, they want employees with the ability to communicate with management and, most importantly, the ability to work with others. The graduate should be solid in basic data structures and how they are applied to solutions. Additionally dynamic HTML web services are welcome.

In any job market, employers always desire graduates with sound technical skills that complement their teams. For instance, graduates may want to be cognizant of disruptive technologies in their fields such as software programming, coding, designing, 3d printing, project management, digital marketing, technical writing, data analytics and etc. In addition, employers have special fondness for graduates with multidisciplinary capabilities and skills. Having such sound skills would enable them to evolve as an independent thinker and thrive as a team player.