Tips for Breaking Into Tech, From Dr. Lisa Ibanez
Looking to make a career change? Today, Dr. Lisa Ibañez, a Senior User Experience (UX) Researcher at Apple, shares her top tips for making a career change from academia to tech:
- Look up job descriptions for researchers in tech. One of the common jobs is user experience researcher. You may also see research scientist roles. Data scientist roles may be good for those with strong quantitative skills. See what the job descriptions are saying they want.
- Decide if you like the job descriptions. Does this sound appealing to you at the broad level? Do you have the technical skills? What don't you have? Use that to start digging into areas you might want to read up on. Check Coursera and YouTube to learn more. When I was doing my initial research on tech jobs, I fell more in love with it. In general, in academia, we may spend a lot of years developing the best possible tools. But then we realize, there’s no real end user for these tools. No medical doctor or therapist has the time to actually use the tool. As I was learning about the paradigms that guide UX research and product development, I really appreciated and embraced how you should start by thinking about end users and their specific contexts and needs. I was excited about that, which reaffirmed this was probably something I should go into.
- Study the tech industry. Read books. Listen to audio books. It’s like your literature review of the field. Like any lit review, the research will show more paths and more avenues to consider. And also, more universities now have human computer interaction departments. Those departments are training the next wave of tech researchers. So you may not go to the department to get another graduate degree, but you can see if your university has one of those departments, and see what events they have going on. Are there any lectures you can take? Could you pop into a course? Find ways to collaborate?
- Talk to friends at tech companies. Ask them, do you work with UX researchers? Do you work with research scientists? What is their function?
- Learn the jargon and interview questions. Learning the jargon is really important for showing you can make the transition from academia to tech. It allows you to communicate clearly during interviews and in the job. You share a mental model. Google interview questions for a UX researcher, data scientist, or research scientist in tech. You’ll see what types of questions are typical.
- It may take a while to break in. The industry has gotten tough. The talent pool is saturated because there've been a lot of layoffs and new openings have been slow. And even before the current situation, it took me three years to break in. So this may be the best time to start the learning journey, because in a couple years, the hiring climate might be better.
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Thank you to Dr. Ibañez for sharing her insights on breaking into tech. If you know someone who might be interested in today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to them? Our scholarly world is better when we share resources and ideas.
And in case you missed it, Dr. Ibañez explained why she decided to break into tech in our last newsletter. You can find even more scholar stories by checking out the Scholar Voices archive.
As always, thanks for reading and believing that scholars deserve support for incredible ideas.
Betty
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P.S. My family in Taiwan is safe after the 7.4-magnitude earthquake this month. Thank you!
P.P.S. You may be wondering why anyone would visit Taiwan, given all The Ring of Fire coverage lately. Besides being beautiful, Taiwan has amazing fruit. Check out these jujubes. They look like green apples, but they taste like a cross between asian pears and lembu (the red fruit behind them). Jujubes are the best fruit I’ve ever had.
