My CareerFoundry Experience

My most recent post discussed how I knew when to switch careers. But when I had to return home to be with my family in Seattle during COVID, I knew it was the perfect time to start my UX Immersion course.

Before you begin your own UX journey, I encourage you to look into all bootcamps and see which ones fit your work ethic and budget the best. There are many UX bootcamps that will take a lot of money from you that can supposedly promise to get you a job faster / set you up with a lot connections before even finishing your course, but CareerFoundry suited my work ethic and budget the best.

Here are a list of things you should know before signing up for CareerFoundry.

• It is entirely self-motivated learning.

  • There are no classes you'll be attending with other people taking the same course as you.

  • You'll be assigned an intro app you want to develop and then create one native application for the rest of your course that you will be the UX / UI Designer and Researcher on so you'll be fully integrated into every step of developing an application so if you need a class structure or an attendance to push you forward, this course is not for you.

  • Taking the time to set your own goals and complete your work will be based on how determined you are to complete each step and become more knowledgeable about UX.

    • Helpful Note: You will want to use the group chats and Slack channel for camaraderie with other CareerFoundry students and to help each other out with doing interviews, usability tests while you're working on your projects. They will be a great resource and live all over the world so you get to meet lots of cool people.

      
      

• There are only UX / UI Design courses, and my certification states that I completed a "UX Immersion" course.

  • The idea of the course is for you to take away from it what you enjoyed working on the most and decide to make a decision on which direction you want to go in. When I finished my course I found what stood out the most to me was UX Research and am now a full-time UX Researcher. I found that all the skills I needed to learn before finding my first job was all within the course.

  • Knowing about UX Design is part of being a UX Researcher so I am grateful I finished my course with an understanding about each position so I would know how to collaborate with Designers on my team in the workplace.

    
    

• Having a great tutor is EVERYTHING.

  • Your tutor will be your most valuable resource because they are the ones who will approve your work and move you onto the next step so make sure they are taking the time to give you proper notes and feedback.

  • It should take a couple of tries on big projects to get approved. If you don't feel you are receiving enough notes / constructive criticism then you can ask the company to set you up with a new tutor.

    •  TLDR: If your tutor immediately approves your work each time with a look "Looks great!" ask to switch to a tutor that will push you to be an industry professional.

  
  

• Your Career Counselor is what you make of it.

  • CareerFoundry will direct you to a Career Counselor when you complete your course. They are a great resource because they aren't strictly working within CareerFoundry and have a lot of experience in helping people find work.

  • They will assign a set of tasks for you to complete to feel ready for work but I mostly just used them as an additional resource in addition to using Indeed, Linkedin, and speaking with recruiting agencies.

  • I found my CareerFoundry career counselor to be a lot more knowledgeable than a lot of the ones I met during school so definitely utilize them as much as you can and want!

Overall, I hope these quick bullet points were helpful. I wanted to highlight the four major tips I realized were most vital to me throughout my time at CareerFoundry. If you have any other questions please don't hesitate to reach out.

Thanks, and talk soon.

Elizabeth Turnell