Which job should I accept and what if I fail?

How to have faith in your own UX career decision-making

This is a story I use in mentoring so often that although it’s personal, I’m going to write it up here in case it helps others.🤞

Today it seems there is a lot of pressure on young or new UXers to have some kind of perfect career path and learn every skill set out there along the way; so much so that I don’t know how any of you are getting any actual work done!

A lot of my mentees come to me with challenges such as:

• I have multiple job offers and I don’t know which one to take
• I’ve accepted a job and now I’m having second thoughts
• I chose a great-sounding job but it had a bad outcome (I have “failed”)

These are essentially moments of UX career existential crisis, and you often have to confront them during the early stages of your career, when of course you don’t have the experience to know how to deal with it!

TLDR: It gets better, you will learn to trust yourself, here’s an example.

The story that may help

Here is the story I tell my mentees when they get stuck.

Goldilocks and the three UX agencies

Many years ago I had a choice between three job offers. Lucky me! All three were equally interesting for different reasons, all seemingly included nice people (as much as the interview process allows you to see), all were the same salary. It was a pivotal moment for me as it was my first senior UX role.

The only difference was size of company, and type of work.

1. A large company — where I would be senior, but only within a single team
2. A medium-sized company — where I would be running a department
3. A small company — where I would essentially be a director

I ruminated for the appropriate amount of time, I talked to mentors, I talked to my family and friends, I weighed up the financials and benefits including career development and so on.

I chose job #2 for many reasons but all of them I felt were rational reasons.

I left that job after only 6 months.

The work itself was great. The clients were great. The team around me was great. The senior management was… let’s just say, unstable.

I could not have known this beforehand, but it seems it was widely known in the industry so of course I then spent a period of time beating myself up about my poor career decision-making.

Cue existential career crisis.

Be more researcher

Once I had self-rescued and found a new job with sane people, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I no longer trusted myself, so I did some research.

I got back in touch with the two other companies, as I still had good relationships with the hiring managers and teams there and asked “how did that role turn out?”

Luckily, they were happy to tell me.

Job #1 — the entire team had quit roughly around the week I would have started. I would have been there on my own running everything, or possibly just immediately been made redundant.

Job #3 — the company’s financial situation had changed and the person they had then hired in my place (after I declined) was made immediately made redundant.

So as it turned out, Job #2, no matter how dreadfully it had turned out for me, had actually been the right choice!

Trust the evidence, not your freaked out brain

If I had not gone back and investigated, I would always have assumed that I made the wrong choice.

Much like my mentees, I could have stayed in that existential career crisis place in my mind for months or years. I may never have trusted my own career decision-making skills again.

Sure, if you jump from job-to-job without thinking or weighing up your decisions then you’ll make some blunders but if, like me, you tend to think things through — it is highly unlikely that you will make bad career decisions; only interesting ones.

Learn from your decisions, your successes and your failures

By understanding the reality of the other career paths and outcomes, I learned that I had made the right decision — rationally and intuitively — even though it had turned out to be the least bad of a bad bunch of outcomes.

My rational deliberations were correct at the time, my emotional compass had been operating and more importantly when confronted with reality I knew when to get myself the heck out of the unpleasant situation I was in.

I also learned a few things from the journey that I can pass on to others, and constantly remind myself:

• A career is a marathon not a sprint — Every job does not have to be perfect.
• Your career is not instagram or facebook — You cannot curate a pixel perfect version of your career because you are living the reality every day. If you try to, you will drive yourself mad.
• Every job adds value to your career and skills development — Even if you don’t realise it at the time
• Every job builds your network of professional connections — Every company has good and more difficult people. Just be sure to leave the difficult ones behind.
• One unsuccessful job does not “mess up” your CV — If you are a permie and you have a short term role in your CV it can look odd, but it’s easy to prepare a clear explanation of why something didn’t work out.
• Most people have at least one dreadful job in their CV — Probably more. They’ve just learned to hide it well.
• If a job is truly dreadful and impacting your mental health, get the hell out — And do so as quickly and (financially) safely as you can. You can process the emotional side of it later.
• Don’t forget to focus on the job you are in — Once you are in a job that suits your overall career path, stop worrying about your next move and focus on building skills, experience and connections where you are. If you are perm, give yourself a 2 year break from career-fretting and get to work on work.

Keep moving forward

As I’ve said before, I’m fully aware that research suggests young’uns aren’t very good at taking advice from older people — but if you’re reading this in a state of career existential crisis, my advice is — don’t allow it to paralyse you.

Sometimes, making any decision is better than making none. Trust yourself, keep moving forward and keep learning from your decisions — whether the outcome is good, or just interesting.

Background & useful links

I’ve written before about UX skills development for different career paths — how challenging it can be to learn all the skills involved in UX, which are needed or not and when, how you can turn yourself into a valuable UX designer or researcher or even someone who does a bit of everything.

I’ve also written about some of the lessons I’ve learned over the last 15 years and that it is possible to take an indirect career route and end up where you want to be.

All routes to UX are just fine. It’s what you do along the way that matters.

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