From marketing to UX: Switching careers with no experience

It’s been exactly 4 and a half years since the day I decided to throw away my lifelong dreams of academia and my place at the University of York, where I was 2 months into my BA English Literature degree.

I had spent every waking minute of my childhood either working towards or dreaming towards a long list of A’s and A+’s (or A*’s when in the UK) on my report cards, because, that’s what defines success, right?

I’m very grateful that I figured out as early as I did that this simply isn’t the case.

Marketing was never something on the cards for me, mainly because I just hadn’t been exposed to it through school. It wasn’t ever on the list of suggested careers alongside ‘doctor’, ‘teacher’ and ‘engineer’. Just like most things I’ve learned in the last 5 years, it’s simply a case of ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’.

Fast forward a couple of years, I started up on my own as a freelance social media marketer, which I pursued for a couple of years before getting quite bored of working alone and scheduling Tweets for a living (this was, arguably, a very small part of the job but is what took up the majority of my time).

So, I got myself a job as a Marketing Manager in a small Newcastle company, working in a tight-knit, small team where I took on the role of ‘the marketing department’ and had full reign of all company communications. This was a pretty great position to be in!

However, there was always something missing. The work was fulfilling when you did occasionally have a breakthrough with metrics, when you delivered your annual report to be told “this is the best our social media presence has ever been”, or when someone actually approached you at an event and said, “I see your content everywhere, it’s amazing!”. But, these occasions were few and far between. Someone who I recently spoke to, also an ex-marketeer, also made the comment that it’s a pretty “thankless” job. I can’t help but agree.

I had known for a while that I wasn’t going to stay in marketing. It was something I was good at, so it was something I could do in the meantime while I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do, but I wasn’t fulfilled.

I’m not writing this article to dismiss marketing as a discipline in any way at all, as in fact, I think it’s a profession that is undermined and undervalued immensely. It’s always the first department to receive cuts in an organisation, whilst also being absolutely essential for business success. However, for me, it was no longer something I enjoyed. It didn’t fulfil me, and I felt I could do something more.

I was sharing a product with the world, but I wasn’t creating the product.

I didn’t have any control of what happened after the user clicked the ad, or the carefully crafted Instagram post, because that was my job done.

My job was to catch people’s attention, draw them in, and then send them to the next stage of their journey. That’s what metrics are all about, right?

I quickly began to realise that I wanted something more, and that’s how I stumbled across UX.

The reality is that there’s a lot of crossover between UX and marketing, namely that marketing makes up a huge part of the user experience. This worked in my favour, as I knew I had to start getting some hands-on experience in my current role. Luckily for me, the company website needed a drastic overhaul.

This was a project that took up the majority of 2020 and kept me busy while working from home. For context, I had also invested in an Interaction Design Foundation membership and took a few UX courses to give me a framework to begin with. I used my newfound knowledge to approach this website redesign in the best, most user-centred way I could (as a one-woman department who was also wearing many other hats).

I carried out usability testing, made some simple paper prototypes, created a UX report, and then worked closely with our web development agency to create a much cleaner, simplified, and usable site. It was by no means perfect for two reasons:

1. Our budget was teeny-tiny
2. I had very limited time, knowledge and resources. If I was to do it again, there’s a lot I’d do differently.

But regardless, it was a fantastic way of building up my UX mindset. Your UX mindset can be applied in almost any job or role you’re currently occupied with, even if it seems a million miles off. This mindset in itself, aside from my portfolio projects, was a key factor in making this career switch.

I no longer viewed marketing campaigns in the same way. I saw them as part of a much bigger journey, and they had to be carefully crafted not just to look pretty, but to set the scene for the rest of the user’s experience.

Everything I did on a day-to-day basis, I tried to approach with a ‘user-centred mindset’. Asking myself questions like…

“Will this help our customer/user achieve their goal?”

“Is this helping or hindering their journey?”

“How can this be done better, so as to be more efficient, transparent and convenient for our users/customers?”

This can apply to almost anything. Writing newsletters, organising events, creating new programmes, designing website and social media content, brainstorming new ideas for products, or even drafting up a response for a tender. There is always an end-user, and it’s up to us to meet their needs in the most effective way possible.

I became an advocate for user experience in my organisation, even when I wasn’t gifted with the title.

Saying all this, it still wasn’t an easy switch. Going through the job hunting process again really made me realise how much I hate job hunting, especially considering:

1. I had no “official” experience in the field I was trying to go into
2. It was the middle of a pandemic.

There were 2 pretty big barriers in my way, but without sounding too wishy-washy, I knew persistence was key. I struggled, I applied for many jobs and received rejections almost immediately, and I definitely cried (a couple of times). It felt almost impossible, and it was that age-old problem of needing experience to get experience. The typical catch-22 that we all face at some point in our lives.

The day I finally received that phone call and heard the words, “We would love to give you an offer”, I did in fact cry happy tears. It was the moment when everything I had been working so hard towards, after facing so many failures, finally came together. It was the same feeling that I had when I crossed the finish line at the Great North Run. Pure relief, happiness, joy, and above all, achievement.

The job I had actually applied for was as a Content Designer, a title I hadn’t even heard of until a few months beforehand. Content design falls under the umbrella of UX but it also happened to have the most crossover with what I was previously doing, in terms of word-smithing, and so it seemed like the best way to cross the bridge from marketing to UX. Funnily enough, after I was hired, I actually found out my title is ‘UX Associate’, which basically means I get to do some content design but also have the freedom to try other areas of UX, such as interaction design, service design, and user research. Once you level up, you can start to decide where your specialisms lie. So, it all worked out really well.

There are 3 main things I did to make this transition from marketing to UX:

1. Start building up a UX mindset in your current job. Ask yourself the questions I listed earlier in this article for every task that you do. This also helps a lot with writing your CV, if you can write about your experience from a UX perspective.
2. Start building a portfolio. I’m going to write a separate article on how I did this with no “official” experience, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
3. Reach out to people from companies you’re interested in on LinkedIn. This is ultimately how I got my job. I reached out to a couple of content designers, who ended up referring me to the recruitment manager. I now get to work closely with these two people, and I have an immense amount of gratitude towards them.

To summarise, it wasn’t an easy journey by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s absolutely possible.

I’m now 4 months into my new career, and I couldn’t be happier with the choice I made. I’m about to start work on my very first client, which just happens to be the NHS, and I can’t wait to document and share this incredible experience!