UX challenge #31: Got transferable skills into UX?

We’ve worked with a lot of mid-senior level professionals who are seeking UX career changes. These folks come to us with impressive 3-10 year careers in education, healthcare, marketing, non-profits, customer service, project management, sales and admin roles that they are seeking to leave behind.

But guess what? While they are excited for a brand new career in UX, it doesn’t always mean that they have to start from scratch! A lot of seasoned professionals and career changers feel a lack of confidence in their UX design capabilities, which leads them to apply to junior or entry-level UX design jobs ($85K-$120K per year).

While it is true that their Figma skills could use more honing and refining, UX design is not the only viable UX career path for a lot of these professionals. We’ve helped a lot of mid-senior level professionals and UX bootcamp grads rebrand to mid-senior level UX research and UX lead roles ($130K - $240K) after working with them to rebrand transferable skills from past professions into their UX profession.

What are some transferable skills that could lead to a mid-senior level UX Research role or Product Design role?

• Project management and project scoping expertise

• Stakeholder management

• Facilitating and leading workshops and meetings

• Service design (improving and optimizing internal processes)

• Cross-functional collaboration

• Measuring impact (revenue generated, costs and time saved, etc.)

• Agile development management

While these transferable skills are incredibly valuable when rebranding to mid-senior level UX research and product design roles, it is also important to address UX knowledge gaps.

We’ve found that addressing the following UX knowledge gaps in our 7-Month UX Design Accelerator program helps professionals tell a compelling story about their UX expertise during interviews with recruiters and hiring managers.

• Advanced UX research methods: We’ve helped our alumni with learning about discovery UX research, trauma-informed UX research practices, facilitating UX workshops and ideation sessions, as well as conducting observational studies. We’ve also helped them collect quantitative data around their ideation by setting up pretotype experiments to justify which idea would be most likely to succeed in the market.

• Product scoping, feature scoping, project scoping: We teach our alumni to find “hair on fire” problems that their users are facing, that require immediate solving. We also teach them to evaluate product and feature ideas from a business, technical, and operations perspective to really think through the viability and feasibility of these ideas. This requires really understanding the business model for their product or service.

• Product positioning & product marketing: We teach our alumni about blue ocean strategy, helping them position their startup product idea in an under-saturated or invisible market where they can provide low-cost, high-value solutions to a community that has been ignored by mainstream markets and brands. We help them scope aspirational and innovative products and feature ideas with obvious differentiators that stand out from competitor brands.

• Product pricing, monetization & business models: A HUGE reason to build and understand the business model of your product or service is to understand how to price your product or service given operations costs and constraints. From a business perspective, it’s important to design, build, maintain, and scale a product in a sustainable manner, expanding features from year to year, quarter to quarter.

• How a product scales as a business scales: It’s important to start designing a product MVP (minimum viable product), the simplest version of your product that can be built fast and monetized with your target market. However, as the business grows and scales, resources will be available to scale and expand product features as well. It’s important to strike a balance between how the business scales versus how the product scales with it!

This is exactly how some of UX Woman our alumni were able to rebrand their past careers into senior UX research roles.

• Aliyah transformed a 5-year marketing career into UX research at Reddit.

• Velvet transformed a 5-year schoolteacher career into UX research.

• Jennifer rebranded a 10-year therapist career into UX research.

• Valerie rebranded a 10-year healthcare career into a UX lead role.

• Yasmine rebranded a 10-year Starbucks manager career into a UXR role.

We have also had alumni rebrand to mid-senior product designer roles by addressing the above knowledge gaps:

• Kristin doubled her salary by becoming a senior product designer.

• Angelina doubled her salary by becoming a senior product designer.

• Ilona doubled her salary as a UX designer for Keller Williams.

• Anna became a UX designer at Capital One.
  

So our challenge for you today is to think about transferable skills you might have developed in the last 2-10 years and see if you can rebrand that into a UX research career.

• Book a call with us to talk through these transferable skills and we can work together to see what UX career path and career level makes the most sense for YOU.

• Watch our video about mindsets for UX career changers to have amidst a tight job market and tech layoffs from the last few years.

So are you ready to think through your transferrable skills and come up with a UX career blueprint tailored to YOU? As we approach back-to-school season in September, I wanted to see if you were considering investing in a UX course for yourself.

If you are serious about committing to the UX Woman 7-Month Accelerator program for our Fall 2026 cohort, here is a checklist of HW and to-dos:

• 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. You can email me or set up another call with me if you have more questions before registering. LIVE classes start Sunday September 20!

• 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.

Let me know if you have any questions as you consider your options and make decisions regarding your UX career goals in 2026 and 2027!

As always, rooting for your success!

Samaya, your UX Woman.

P.S. Don’t forget to gift yourself something by investing in your future this summer. 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.