With an abundance of workers to choose from, employers are demanding more of job candidates than ever before. They want prospective workers to be able to fill a role right away, without any training or ramp-up time.
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Unfortunately, American companies don’t seem to do training anymore. Data are hard to come by, but we know that apprenticeship programs have largely disappeared, along with management-training programs. And the amount of training that the average new hire gets in the first year or so could be measured in hours and counted on the fingers of one hand. Much of that includes what vendors do when they bring in new equipment: “Here’s how to work this copier.”
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We aren’t going to get European-style apprenticeships in the U.S. They require too much cooperation among employers and bigger investments in infrastructure than any government entity is willing to provide. We’re also not going to go back to the lifetime-employment models that made years-long training programs possible.
The experiment: I’ll give you five bullet points why I would hire you or wouldn’t hire you.
I’ll also give you some tips on what direction you should go. I’ll respond to as many as possible, but can’t promise anything.
Since I’m doing this for free, I’m going to put a few requirements around this:
Send your resume and portfolios to pat@usabilitycounts.com.
When I was at IIW earlier this week, I held a session called, “A Contrarian View of Identity: Envision a World with Only Real Names.”
The ground rules of this session were:
I then asked those in the room to close their eyes. Take a deep breath. Envision all of the identities that you use online and out in the world. See them moving to the middle and coming together, becoming one identity, and that name is your real legal name. If there is any negativity coming up with this, just put it aside for the moment. Sit with this vision of your identity as your real legal name. Take another deep breath. Pause. Now open your eyes.
I’m Generation X. Thought this was classic. Not entirely safe for work, but who cares.
Some excerpts:
But Generation X is tired of your sense of entitlement. Generation X also graduated during a recession. It had even shittier jobs, and actually had to pay for its own music. (At least, when music mattered most to it.) Generation X is used to being fucked over. It lost its meager savings in the dot-com bust. Then came George Bush, and 9/11, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generation X bore the brunt of all that. And then came the housing crisis.
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Generation X is beyond all that bullshit now. It quit smoking and doing coke a long time ago. It has blood pressure issues and is heavier than it would like to be. It might still take some ecstasy, if it knew where to get some. But probably not. Generation X has to be up really early tomorrow morning.
Generation X is tired.
It’s a parent now, and there’s always so damn much to do. Generation X wishes it had better health insurance and a deeper savings account. It wonders where its 30s went. It wonders if it still has time to catch up.
Right now, Generation X just wants a beer and to be left alone. It just wants to sit here quietly and think for a minute. Can you just do that, okay? It knows that you are so very special and so very numerous, but can you just leave it alone? Just for a little bit? Just long enough to sneak one last fucking cigarette? No?
Some User Experience designers think they are entitled to great jobs out of the gate.
They think that just going to college and getting the degree is enough. That presenting the wireframes from a college project represents a portfolio. That it’s okay to ask for $100 per hour when you really have nothing to show except for a few prototypes. That just showing up gets you a one percent raise every year, if it gets you a job at all.
For those people that think that, I don’t want to hire them.
As a hiring manager, I want people that show up AND do amazing work.
I want someone that has worked at a startup and failed. I want someone who gets excited talking about building iPhone application ideas on the side. I want conversations about the rule of thirds, food porn, and why the movie Helvetica left you speechless.
I want to ask you what you think of Jeffery Veen, Jeffery Zeldman and Dan Saffer. I want to fill a wall of inspiration with you and talk design on a Sunday afternoon over a latte at Caffe Greco. I want you to tell me the differences between Visio, Omnigraffle, Basalmiq and Axure, and which is your favorite.
Being a great designer takes motivation and going the extra mile. The best are there. You should join us.
Today's UX teams, whether focused on enterprise or consumer products, must be strategic to understand the business opportunities while still being tactically focused to execute pixels with precision. This requires a new cross-disciplinary approach, bringing together business strategy, content strategy, interaction design, market research, data analysis, and technical expertise, among other skill sets.
The risks of not evolving UX teams to meet these needs will become quickly obvious for organizations. Brands that get it will break out of the pack with richer and more engaging experiences, proven business results, and design efficiencies that will inherently make them more successful. Brands that don't adapt will fall behind, under serving their brands, their users, and ultimately their bottom lines.
Shawn Capizzi was 1,000. He gets a George Foreman grill!
Richard Dreyfuss did the final commercial. Steve Jobs did the first one.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
