Part 4: What to do once you get there (the bonus part)

Building forward momentum!

A theme that has been throughout this book so far is that you will have to continue learning about UX. You don’t want to be on the peak of Mt. Stupid; you also do not want to be in the valley of despair. The goal is always to be moving forward—that nice uphill of constantly improving. As with any job, there are plenty of issues that come along the way, no matter what field or team you are on. You are dealing with people, and no one is perfect. Some of the issues that Vy goes over specifically are interpersonal, employers misunderstanding the fundamentals of UX, forgetting business calls, and personal management issues.

And you can never forget the soft skills that you need always to be working on, such as the ability to collaborate and work with a team, to be pragmatic, never forgetting to network, and to avoid burning out. Not that any of these are less important than the other, but the section on persevering and avoiding burnout is a fantastic section. Vy provides diagnostic steps to help you evaluate if your current position is causing burnout and what you can do about it. I have personally experienced burnout in many different types of jobs. Jobs that don’t value the work-life balance and which ultimately come down to them not fully valuing employees, or that are on the low end of the totem pole of importance, never get bothered with.

“Find and define you burnout limits, then take away your efforts a notch down from there and continuously perform at that capacity.”
-Vy Alechnavicius.

Book:

Get Into UX by Vy Alechnavicius