UX challenge #28: have you found the right UX career path for YOU or are you still feeling things out?

Have you found the right UX career path for YOU or are you still feeling things out? Here are 3 things to consider when planning your UX career in 2026, especially when our early bird deadline for the 7-Month UX Design Accelerator program is just 4 WEEKS away!

Welcome back to UX Challenge #28 on the UX Psychology behind everyday brands. I’m Samaya, your UX Woman, and I help UX career changers land six-figure UX jobs and interviews at brands like CVS, Capital One, GE, Reddit, Nike, and even Google, sharing my experiences working for brands like Disney, Hulu, Marvel, Vanguard and more.

#1. Are you leaning towards a strategic UX career path like UX research or strategic product design? Or are you learning towards a more visually oriented UX career path like UX/UI design or interaction design? Think through your current strengths and weaknesses as you consider both avenues. You can take our UX personality quiz to help you make a decision and focus on 1 UX career path.

#2. Are you leveraging transferable skillsets from past career paths or educational expertise you’ve developed? If you’ve had a previous career that’s lasted between 2-10 years, you should be considering transferable skillsets you’ve developed that can help you land UX jobs. We’ve helped some UX career changers even land senior level UX jobs due to their transferable skills! You can connect with our alumni to hear about their transitions into senior UX roles after going through our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator.

#3 Are you clear on what your UX portfolio should include? Your UX portfolio should focus on 1-2 UX career paths and 1-2 industries you would like to work in, such as healthcare, finance, ecommerce, entertainment, social media or B2B SAAS. Get clear on what you would like to pursue before applying blindly to any and every UX job! During UX career consult calls I have with our community, I always encourage them to research who is hiring in their industry of interest (e.g., healthcare) and find the gaps in those organizations. What are they missing or overlooking in terms of healthcare problems? What invisible markets are they ignoring or dismissing? By solving those problems in your UX portfolio, you will stand out as a candidate.

The 3 biggest problems that UX Woman’s 7-Month UX Design Accelerator solves is helping you stay on track and stay focused to build an intentional UX portfolio that attracts the right recruiters and hiring managers to YOU, in line with your UX career goals and vision for your creative direction. How do we help?

#1: We help you stay focused on 1 UX career path, even when you might be tempted to take on a generalist approach. We helped one alumni land a UX research role at Reddit after convincing her to stop prioritizing UX design jobs, when her expertise was clearly more geared towards a strategic UX career path. We teach the end-to-end UX design process within our 4-month UX curriculum, helping you learn advanced UX skillsets like qualitative and quantitative UX methods, business strategy, service design, product and feature scoping, product positioning, and AI product design.

#2: We help you learn how to rebrand past transferable skillsets as UX research, service design, or design systems work. We’ve worked with educators, healthcare professionals, graphic designers, architects and more to consider both their strategic skillsets and visual skillsets from their past careers. These skillsets can often be rebranded to attract the right recruiters and hiring managers to them. After the 4-months of 0-1 product design curriculum, we offer 3 months of 1-on-1 UX career coaching where we help our students with UX resume writing, LinkedIn profile writing, UX case study templates, and UX interview prep.

#3: We help you build an intentional UX portfolio with 3-5 UX case studies that attract the right recruiters and hiring managers to YOU. We’ve spoken with hundreds of UX career changes within our community who have been getting burned out by negative news headlines on layoffs or AI, and even overwhelmed by the amount of UX learning resources out there like the Google Coursera course and the school of YouTube. Unfortunately, most free UX resources don’t provide the depth of knowledge you need to successfully pivot into UX. Our UX Woman curriculum provides over 50+ hours of UX knowledge that will help you gain an edge and build a UX portfolio that isn’t cookie-cutter or generic, like the thousands of other junior UX portfolios out there.

However, this course is not for everybody. Our mentors and instructors put in a lot of care and intention towards delivering great UX learning and UX career coaching. Over the next 4 WEEKS till the early bird deadline (September 10), we are looking to work with 5 folks who are ready to:

#1: Work through their uncertainty to focus on 1 UX career path and 1-2 industries to specialize in for their UX portfolio. This involves doing some soul searching on your end to define an intentional path forward for yourself that aligns with past expertise and future passion. Take 4 hours within our online UX Design Hackathon to define this for yourself and then book a 20-minute strategy consult with us to talk through your direction!

#2: Work through fears around career identity changes that comes with a rebrand into UX. Learn about how your transferable skillsets from past careers can translate as service design, and start to get comfortable with building a new career identity for yourself… this often means breaking up with your old identity, which can be tough!

#3: Put in the work required to build an intentional UX portfolio, UX resume, and LinkedIn profile that reflects a rebrand to UX. Learn about the state of UX in 2026 and how you can pivot into UX design with success today.

Some tough love for today: there are no shortcuts into UX. You have to commit to doing the inner work on yourself, as well as the work of learning UX design and building a UX portfolio. This requires a commitment to learning and growing, consistently showing up for yourself every day and every week over the next 6-9 months.

If you can make that promise to yourself to show up consistently and commit to working on yourself so that you can land a UX job, then:

• Connect with an alumni from our program to learn more about the course! You can connect with them on Linkedin and schedule a call with them.

• Register for the Spring 2026 cohort by paying the $490 registration fee by the September 10th early bird deadline which is just 4 WEEKs away. You can set up a call with me if you have more questions before registering.

• Use our holiday discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on the course registration.

• Book a call with me to discuss your project topic or your UX career goals for coaching so that we have a plan before we go through the curriculum and the mentorship/coaching together.

• You can pay the remainder of the tuition in one lump sum ($6960) due by Sunday September 20 when class starts. If you can pay in one lump sum, we give you $500 off on the lump sum tuition payment using the discount code 500-OFF.

• You can also pay the remainder of the tuition ($6960) within a 4-month payment plan or 7-month payment plan (early bird tuition prices). There are no discounts for monthly payments.

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman

P.S. We already have a handful of folks registered for the Fall 2026 cohort. If you are ready to put your stake in the ground and start building with intention, I recommend registering for the Fall 2026 cohort TODAY to save your seat! And don’t be a stranger! You can use the summer discount code UXDESIGN101 to get $200 off on your registration.