Effective Resumes for UX Students and Graduates

The resume is a professional document frequently neglected by many experienced UX professionals. But the resume becomes a daunting obstacle for unprepared UX students and graduates. There’s just so much space to fill on the page! This blank-space problem can tempt students to use unhelpful space-filling strategies that are a red flag to any observant UX hiring manager. Overcome this challenge and increase your odds of securing that first UX job by prioritizing the right content and investing time wisely.

A Few Reminders and Caveats

This advice applies to internships or jobs in North America. Other countries may have different cultural or legal expectations regarding resumes.

Also, this guidance is for resumes used for applying to industry opportunities. Academia may refer to this professional document as a curriculum vitae (CV). CVs focus on areas such as publications, academic-research projects, conference participation, references. If you have earned an advanced degree and participate in academic pursuits more frequently than other UX professionals, don’t submit a CV to industry jobs. Always check the job ad to see if academic-level research is a job responsibility or prerequisite. (The term ‘CV’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘resume’, unfortunately.) An academia-formatted CV will not persuade a UX hiring manager; they may even make inaccurate and harmful assumptions about your fit for an industry job. Creating a separate, industry-formatted resume is worth the effort.

General Resume Guidelines

Refer to our previous article on resumes for UX career switchers for tips on designing your resume for UX hiring managers. Most of that guidance still applies to students and graduates, but below are topics worth emphasizing.

• Multiple formats: PDF and Microsoft Word are the two ideal formats for resumes. Word-formatted resumes are for applicant tracking systems (ATS) that parse and track data submitted in applicant documents. PDF-formatted resumes are best for human consumption.
• Reverse chronological order: Always arrange your resume from most recent experiences to least recent experiences, regardless if your particular experience is a job, an internship, or a degree. List degrees by your actual or expected graduation date since they take several years to earn.
• Simple visual design: Students and graduates sometimes try to fill a sparse resume with graphics, illustrations, or huge fonts. These techniques don’t work as they only make you stand out in an obvious manner compared to candidates who have meaningful content to communicate.
• Error-free: Moreso than experienced UX professionals, you cannot afford mistakes in your professional documents. Because students and graduates typically have less relevant prior experience, spelling and grammar mistakes can derail your candidacy. A study by Philippe Sterkens and colleagues found that just 2 resume errors reduced the chances of an interview for graduate applicants by 7.3% due to unfavorable perceptions of the applicant’s interpersonal skills, cognitive ability, and conscientiousness. Disappointingly (perhaps unsurprisingly), women were penalized more for resume errors.

Contact Information

Reserve the top of your resume for contact information and a few administrative details:

• Name: Remember that resumes are not legal documents. You can use a preferred name or nickname, which can reduce unconscious bias.
• Location: include your current city, state, and ZIP code, even if you don’t plan on staying at that location after graduation. To communicate fluid living arrangements common with students, use labels such as: Relocating to <city, state> by <date>, or Location flexible. Accurately convey your plans or preferences to avoid wasting everyone’s valuable time.
• Portfolio link: review our advice on portfolios for designers and portfolios for researchers. Your portfolio should not be a dump of lengthy research papers or slide decks delivered for class assignments. You must curate and simplify this content for a nonacademic audiences with little time or patience to download files or parse academic prose.
• Email address: Don’t be quick to discard your university email address! Research by Gary Burns and colleagues found that resumes with a ‘.edu’ email address received more favorable evaluations from hiring managers. However, remember to check your university’s policy on retaining ‘.edu’ email addresses after graduation. Don’t miss a job opportunity because your university turned off your ‘.edu’ email. Switch to a professional email address after securing your first full-time job.
• Phone number: Check your voicemail recording and rerecord it to sound polite and professional, if necessary.
• Visa-sponsorship disclaimer: In the United States, employers may ask candidates specific questions regarding their need for a visa to work legally in the country. These questions are usually presented on the application form and recorded in the ATS. UX hiring managers may miss these answers due to usability issues with the ATS. In addition, a few candidates may answer these questions deceptively to gain leverage on an employer if they eventually receive a job offer (an ill-advised strategy that will not end well). Unambiguously communicate your lack of need for visa sponsorship by including the phrase Sponsorship never needed in your resume header if all the following criteria apply to you:
  • You will never need visa sponsorship from your employer because you are a U.S. citizen, green-card holder, or due to some other circumstance. The word never indicates you are not on a temporary employment-authorization program (such as Optional Practical Training) but do not state your citizenship status for legal reasons.
  • You have educational or work experiences outside of North America.
  • You suspect your name’s ethnic character may be unfamiliar to predominately English-speaking North American UX hiring managers.
• Small visual elements: include unobtrusive personal branding if you possess visual-design skills, but it should never interfere with the resume’s main content.

Underneath the contact-information header list any combination of education, work experiences, internships, and extracurriculars in reverse-chronological order.

Education

Students devote most of their time to earning their academic credentials. Treat this experience as you would a job and list it with the following information:

• Degree: List the credential name in bold. Include the level if a degree (BS, MS, PhD).
• University: Mention the academic institution awarding this credential.
• Dates: Note the time it took to earn this credential. Include the start and end dates using both months and years. Include the label Expected if citing a planned graduation date.
• Location: Universities frequently have multiple campuses with similar names. Include the location if it reduces ambiguity.
• Coursework: Describe your coursework in 2–3 concise sentences. What topics and courses did you study? Did you complete a capstone project or publish a dissertation? Specifically mention job-relevant skills, tools, and techniques you were taught. A study by Peg Thoms and colleagues found that resumes that described coursework received a more favorable rating from reviewers. However, avoid the specialized jargon often used in academia. Such language may confuse an industry UX hiring manager; use generic terms that most will understand.
• Achievements: Achievements are how you uniquely made a noteworthy impact as a student. They can take various forms, such as scholarships, graduating honors, grants, or winning competitions.
  • List achievements in a bulleted list. (Use the simplest, most common filled-circle format for bullets because ATS scans may look for this symbol to process your resume accurately.)
  • Keep achievements to one line for readability, even if your resume has ample space.
  • List your GPA as your first achievement and continue listing it for at least the next several years, even if it’s unremarkable or lower than you’d prefer. Omitting your GPA will make the UX hiring manager assume you earned low grades.
  • Note your major-specific GPA in parentheses, especially for undergraduate degrees where the coursework can be diverse.
  • Write an achievement using this structure: [Verb] [quantitative outcome] [context] using [skill/tool/technology]. Some examples:
    • Graduated in the top 1% of class using Pomodoro time management and organizing study groups.
    • Awarded the 2022 Alphonse Chapanis Award by HFES (out of 200 applicants) for outstanding student research on mobile-app accessibility.
    • Secured a $250,000 grant from National Science Foundation for machine-learning research with Prof. John Smith by leveraging storytelling, clear budgeting, and measurable goals in grant writing.

Internships and Work Experiences

Full-time, part-time, or internship work experiences are the classic persuasive evidence for any resume. Don’t be quick to disregard your nonUX jobs. A study of psychology-graduate resumes by Augustina Sulastri, Martinus Handoko, and J.M.A.M. Janssens found that applicants with resumes containing more work experiences — even work experiences unrelated to the target job — were more likely to succeed in their job search. Once you secure full-time employment, you can remove these short-term “odd jobs” from your resume to create space for UX-relevant roles and accomplishments.

Include this information for each work experience:

• Job title: Treat each job or internship separately. For example, if you had 2 UX-researcher internships at the same company, you would have 2 listings on your resume. Likewise, don’t merge entries if you earned a promotion.
• Employer
• Dates: Include start and end dates using both months and years. Use Present for the end date if this is your current job.
• Part-time, temporary, contract: It’s customary for students to work short-term jobs to support themselves. Mitigate bias about the short tenure of these roles by adding a label clarifying the nature of your employment. Examples of such labels include Contract, Part-time, or Seasonal. This tactic is unnecessary for internships; the word intern is typically in the job title.
• Location: Not always essential to include but add it if it clarifies the job or use a Remote label.
• Responsibilities: Summarize your job duties in 2–3 concise sentences. Job ads or job descriptions are helpful resources; make it a habit of documenting the job description or ad for any job you do. Start with verbs (Designed new features) instead of pronouns (I was responsible for designing new features) and use numbers when appropriate.
• Achievements: Achievements are impactful results you delivered by applying your skills, abilities, and talents. Focus on quantitative achievements and impact whenever possible. Still, it’s common for students and graduates to rely on qualitative achievements due to the short tenure and limited scope of junior-level positions. Some examples:
  • Received “Exceeds Expectations” by manager in all 5 review areas: initiative, work quality, communication, dependability, and time management.
  • Delivered 10 on-time mobile-app compositions for an ecommerce shop using Sketch.
  • Benchmarked a budgeting website’s perceived usability by surveying 254 users using Qualtrics, the System Usability Scale, and Excel.
  • Identified 4 improvement areas for a social media app by performing thematic analysis of interview data in Dovetail.
  • Assisted with 32 user interviews for a banking website team by developing screeners, creating interview guides, distributing honorariums, and coding transcripts.

Extracurriculars

Don’t forget to include extracurricular activities. A study by Stijn Baert and Dieter Verhaest found that heavy extracurricular engagement improved job-interview chances by 7% — the same as excellent academic performance. UX-relevant extracurriculars are ideal, but extensive participation or leadership roles in extracurriculars can still help your resume. Just showing up to the extracurricular’s events is not enough. You need to get involved and contribute.

Include this information for each extracurricular experience:

• Title, organization, dates, location: Follow the advice above. In most cases, Volunteer or Organizer are appropriate titles, but leadership roles or elected positions are excellent to include here.
• Responsibilities: Summarize your duties or participation in 2–3 concise sentences.
• Achievements: Follow the advice above for any achievements you earned. How did your efforts help the organization grow or thrive? How was your support consistent and dependable? Elaborate with numbers whenever possible.

Avoid This Content in Your Resume

Some types of popular content are best left off your resume:

• Precollege education: While this content may be helpful for precollege job seekers, it quickly becomes irrelevant at the postsecondary level and should be omitted.
• Lists of skills or technologies: Including a long list of skills and tools is the scourge of student and graduate resumes. These lists are great for filling up resume space but are uninformative to UX hiring managers and don’t provide the context of when, where, and how you used those skills. Reference these items in your work experiences and coursework.
• Headshots: Don’t use a headshot to pad your resume content as it encourages unconscious bias.
• Mission or objective statements: UX hiring managers understand you’re trying to secure a UX job because you applied. Frame your resume and other professional documents towards what you can do for a prospective UX hiring manager, not what you want to gain from them.
• References: Keep references documented on your academic CV (if you have one); otherwise, remove this content from your resume and provide references only if a prospective employer requests them. That said, it’s still a good idea to plan ahead in case you will be asked for references. Target 3 people familiar with your professional skills and contributions and ask them if they would serve as a reference in the future.
• Hobby and recreational activities: Include sports only if they were an academic focus and you competed at a collegiate level. Casual hobbies have no place on a resume.
• Religious, ethnic, or identity groups: Be mindful of the potential costs of including groups tied to religious, political, ethnic, or identity causes. While these groups’ goals are noble, employers do not evaluate resumes equally despite their reassurances of equal opportunity in job ads. Research by Eva Derous and Ann Marie Ryan found that job applicants encountered discrimination when resumes included minority identifiers. These identifiers had a multiplicative effect — meaning that every additional identifier rapidly increased the negative impact on the applicant’s callback chances.
• School or personal projects: Avoid project-specific sections in your resume and document them in your portfolio, where you can appropriately compose and illustrate the content for compelling storytelling.

Standing Out as a UX Student or Graduate Applicant

Competition for entry-level UX jobs can be fierce. How can a student or graduate stand out from the crowd? Research by Michael Cole and colleagues suggested that students who notably excel in work experience, academics, or extracurriculars received more favorable evaluations than those who performed well in all three. While each of these domains is valuable, reflect on your strengths and past experiences and focus on one area:

• Academic excellence: If you’re just starting your academic career, study hard and excel! But if you only have a year or so left before graduation, realize that most of your academic career has passed, and you won’t be able to raise your GPA substantially. Maintain your grades and invest your time in another area.
• Work experience: Make every job experience count. Exceed expectations in your work roles — earning a promotion is very persuasive! Thoroughly document internship projects for your portfolio to help secure your next internship.
• Extracurricular leadership: Get involved with professional UX organizations. Don’t just show up to events but seek leadership and organizer opportunities. Demonstrate your passion and willingness to invest effort in your chosen profession. Some popular organizations to consider:
  • Association of Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI)
  • User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA)
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES)
  • University-sponsored design clubs and associations

Finally, remember the importance of building your professional network. Both your resume and portfolio work best when you work on delivering them to decision-makers. Utilize university alum associations, connect with folks at events organized by professional UX organization events, and seek a UX mentor with a similar background to yours. These techniques can help you cope with anxiety about your job search, plus they create opportunities for getting your persuasive resume past ATS and recruiter filters and directly in front of a UX hiring manager.

Conclusion

Securing the first UX job out of school is among the most difficult challenges any professional faces, even in favorable economic conditions. The experience can be fraught with setbacks and disappointment. But use these strategies to overcome the fear of the empty resume page and maximize your job opportunities. Sooner than you realize, you’ll have too many remarkable design and research accomplishments to list, and the struggle to fill your resume will become a distant memory.

References

Philippe Sterkens, Ralf Caers, Marijke De Couck, Michael Geamanu, Victor Van Driessche, and Stijn Baert. 2021. Costly Mistakes: Why and When Spelling Errors in Resumes Jeopardise Interview Chances. SSRN Electronic Journal (July 2021). DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3900876

Gary N. Burns, Neil D. Christiansen, Megan B. Morris, David. A. Periard, and John A. Coaster. 2014. Effects of applicant personality on resume evaluations. Journal of Business and Psychology 29, 4 (2014), 573–591. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10869-014-9349-6

Michael S. Cole, Robert S. Rubin, Hubert S. Feild, and William F. Giles. 2007. Recruiters’ perceptions and use of applicant résumé information: Screening the recent graduate. Applied Psychology 56, 2 (2007), 319–343. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1464-0597.2007.00288.x

Stijn Baert and Dieter Verhaest. 2018. Work hard or play hard? degree class, student leadership and employment opportunities. SSRN Electronic Journal (2018). DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3301726

Peg Thoms, Rosemary McMasters, Melissa R. Roberts, and Douglas A. Dombkowski. 1999. Journal of Business and Psychology 13, 3 (1999), 339–356. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1022974232557

Eva Derous and Ann Marie Ryan. 2012. Documenting the adverse impact of résumé screening: Degree of ethnic identification matters. International Journal of Selection and Assessment 20, 4 (2012), 464–474. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ijsa.12009

Augustina Sulastri, Martinus Handoko, and J.M.A.M. Janssens. 2015. Grade point average and biographical data in personal resumes: Predictors of finding employment. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth 20, 3 (2015), 306–316. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2014.996236