A lot of online courses claim that they teach UX Design in 3 to 6 months. There are many bootcamps also that claim that after 4 to 6 months you will become an employable UX designer. But what’s the truth? Let’s see.

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While online courses are becoming more and more common, and schools, colleges and universities are forced to take a step back because of the current coronavirus situation, some people claim that this will become a permanent change in the course of modern education.

Students who have started online courses in this pandemic, claim that it has been a comfortable, mentally peaceful and delightful experience as compared to rushing for classes in a school or college, fear of low attendance, pressure of assignments and completing credits, and so much more. With online courses, they have the freedom to choose their career stream in a much more flexible manner, as compared to choosing a course and then selecting subjects to complete credits for a degree.

Moreover, students are also happy that they don’t have to pay as much as they would, if they’d have gotten themselves into some college/university. The average cost of a bootcamp is somewhere around $5,000 to $8,000 while a semester in a design college costs on an average $10,000 (for state residents) to $50,000 (for out-of-state students).

While if you are studying online, it doesn’t even matter if you belong to that state/country or not.

But the bigger question still stands: whether the online courses and certifications — that claim to turn a student into a fully trained, qualified UX designer in 3–6 months — work or not?

The answer is — definitely a big NO!

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Nobody can become ‘professional’ in 3–6 months in any field, because it’s a fairly low time to call yourself one! Just like in the field of engineering, you need to study for at least four years of college to get the ‘title’ of an engineer, similarly for any field there is enough study/practice required to call yourself a professional.

And more than half of the certifications and bootcamps that promised jobs, turned out to be money-minting machines instead, that took fat cheques from the students, and enrolled them into a program from where they can get indefinite mentorship and support from industry experts, but still — no guarantee of a job.

Students have to always struggle on their own for a job, and that’s the truth. There is competition in every field and design is not different either. Here too, a student will be competing against designers who have experience and designers who have a master’s degree. Here again, to get a job it’s the student who has to be either absolutely amazing with his assignment/interviews or have exceptional portfolio that gets him an edge over others. Ultimately, its the efforts of a student alone, who will guarantee him a job, and not a course or a bootcamp!

You will not be handed an offer letter along with your design certification. And why should you be? Giving a job or hiring a candidate is equal to making an investment. And why will a product manager or a CEO hire you if you are not a good investment for the company? If you don’t bring value?

Before you ask someone else to hire you — ask yourself, if you were the CEO of a company, would you hire yourself or would you hire someone else?

If you think that you have the qualities that would make you hire yourself, write down those qualities and present them to your potential employer! And if you think that you would not hire yourself, ‘work’ on those shortcomings that make you lag behind the designer, that you would rather hire in your place.

How can I say that bootcamps don’t guarantee jobs?

No, I didn’t come to this conclusion myself, I talked to a lot of students (around 10 from my Instagram page, who follow me, and around 10 from various UX groups on Facebook and one on LinkedIn — who have all done either online courses or bootcamps. I talked to them over messages and chats to get to know about their experience with a bootcamp/course they did and majorly I asked them questions about what they were taught.)

Even designers who have completed online courses from good and reputed organisations and camps in the industry, and yet they know nothing more than the basics, that you can find for free online.

Think about it — would you really want to pay $10,000 for content that you can get for free? No, right? But on a positive side you’re getting mentorship in that much money.

Now here, an important question arises.

How long does it take to actually be a trained and professional UX designer?

While the answer depends from person to person — how quickly can you learn and how you fast can you train your mind to effectively solve problems, but the answer is definitely not in ‘weeks or months’.

It takes more than a decade to be a general practitioner, and some professions require even more time of practice to call yourself ‘trained’, then how can you even imagine that you’d be a designer in 10 weeks?

In my personal opinion — it takes around 2 to 5 years, to actually call yourself a ‘UX Designer’. I am working in the industry as a designer since 2.5 years after doing my master’s for 2 years, and despite 4.5 years of time and experience in the industry now, there are still new things that I learn every single day.

Real UX does not lie in visuals and UIs that you see on Dribbble and Behance. Real UX lies in those complex products that are actually hard to even analyse and study, let alone beautify them! Beautifying isn’t even an option when the product isn’t functional in the first place.

I still don’t call myself a 100% trained designer, because even now, I come across problems that are new, and I’ve seen for the first time in my career. I am building a SaaS product right now that works for holiday partners like booking.com, AirBNB, TripAdvisor, Expedia etc.

And the product is very complex, so to say — because it acts as an intermediary for property managers, account managers and booking partners, and it can perform like a million actions from a common dashboard! So, I keep discovering new things, reading new content, solving problems in new ways and studying new stuff to expand my knowledge base.

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So, a lot of you would now think — If not online courses, then what?

That is something that’s absolutely subjective and depends from person to person. There is a reason why master’s still holds value in the industry. Not because the college or university does something extraordinary — but because the student can focus and attentively spend 2 years absolutely on design and projects that help him get an advanced level understanding.

Plus, the teachers who mentor students in master’s are different from those who teach foundation level courses, so of course the level of expertise matters too.

Master’s might be expensive, but it’s valuable considering that you have higher chances of landing a job than after spending $10k on an online course for 3 months. But if you think master’s isn’t for you, there are still options that can help you transition into UX design smoothly —

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Doing self-study

Studying yourself, getting knowledge about basics and advanced design terminologies can help you master UX and finally get a job too. The only way you can actually get a job in UX is by having a great portfolio that showcases your problem-solving skills, and secondly by impressing the interviewer with your solution to their design assignment. Self Study is a valuable but undermined way to get into UX.

But the biggest problem with self-study is ‘validation’.

Who validates that you know design? How can a company trust you? An online certification or a degree course gives you that validation that self-study does not. That’s why students invest their time and money in it. But there are ways to get that validation, if not from a piece of paper, maybe from a piece of professional recommendation?

Doing some free, freelance projects

It might be really tough to get freelance projects, because even clients trust the people who have design background, but you can always work for free for some experience in the beginning. You can even ask some of your friends or family to let you work on their projects for free.

Doing freelance projects after self-study, can be of great help for your career. Later, you can ask your clients to recommend you on LinkedIn & write you testimonials that you can present in front of your potential employers.

Adding fictional projects to your portfolio

Every designer has projects in their portfolio that are concepts and a piece of fiction. Not every designer has all real-projects to show in his portfolio, rather mostly only fictional projects make way to the portfolio because real-projects take a lot of time, manpower and coding-knowledge to be completed.

Rather designers prefer to show screens and prototypes that mock a project to the closest reality. You can do the same. You can always find problems to solve around you, and finally make projects on them. Once you have at least 3 strong projects, your portfolio is complete! Any interviewer would rather look at 3–5 good projects rather than 10 bad ones.

These tips will surely help you get somewhere, than just doing an online course and expecting that you will land a job based upon a couple of certifications. I hope this helped you get clarity around a lot of things — UX!

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published in our platform. This story contributed to UX Para Minas Pretas (UX For Black Women), a Brazilian organization focused on promoting equity of Black women in the tech industry through initiatives of action, empowerment, and knowledge sharing. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.