How Terminal Uniqueness In Your Job Search Is Keeping You Stuck

Intro: [00:00:00] Hey, I’m Sarah Doty, a user researcher and product designer with 20 years of experience. In 2017, I noticed something a little ironic. UX and product people, despite being great at designing experiences for other people, often struggle to design their own careers. That’s why I created Career Strategy Lab and this podcast to help you navigate your UX job search, grow in your current role, and avoid skill and salary plateaus all in a chill and BS free way.

So whether you’re. Stuck in your job search or wondering what’s next in your UX career. You are in the right place.

Today I wanna talk about the topic of terminal uniqueness and how this is likely holding you back in your UX job search or your career. I’m gonna define terminal uniqueness in a moment, but the reason that I feel so strongly that this is an important topic that we have to cover right now is because it’s coming up in most of the [00:01:00] dms in my LinkedIn inbox, in my emails.

According to Becca on my team, it comes up on every single career strategy call Becca does with people who wanna talk to a human before they join us in Career Strategy lab. So let’s talk about terminal uniqueness in your UX career, terminal uniqueness is really this idea that your career path.

So unconventional, so messy, so full of twist turns and detours that what works for other UX candidates who get hired could never work for you. And here are a few signs that you might be stuck in this thinking of terminal uniqueness. You might be thinking, yeah, but I’m not Your average UX job seeker, or My UX background doesn’t fit the mold. Or, don’t know. Maybe other people can pivot into ux, [00:02:00] but my career path before UX is too random and too disconnected, and if that sounds familiar, then this episode.

Is a hundred percent for you because terminal uniqueness is definitely one of the things that’s holding you back. So this belief that your UX career situation is so unique, that proven strategies like the ones we teach in career strategy lab that I’ve personally been testing and iterating since 2017.

These proven strategies are not gonna work for you. Like in June, we had four people get hired at companies like JP Morgan Chase, Liberty Mutual, Geico, and an AI FinTech company. And every month we see situations like this where people apply the proven strategies we teach, get hired. Yet at the same time, other people who are not hired [00:03:00] yet.

Think to themselves, yeah, but I’m too unique. And even though you have all these proven strategies, here are the seven reasons why I know it’s not gonna work for me. Right. That is terminal uniqueness. And let me give you some more examples about how, you know, you might be stuck in this terminal uniqueness mindset.

So maybe you’re someone more senior in your UX career, right? And you’re thinking. But I’ve worked in UX for 20 years. I’ve had all these different job titles. I’ve worked at all different types of companies, different types of products, et cetera. But I don’t really fit the mold of what people want today.

Right. Or maybe you’re, that’s been doing a bunch of freelance work and you’re kind of thinking, yeah, but I’ve done a bunch of freelance work and I’ve done some contracts and now I wanna go in-house full-time and I have a one year career break. So this is not gonna work for me. Who the heck is gonna hire me because of this unconventional [00:04:00] background?

Right? Or maybe you’re someone switching careers to UX and you’re thinking, yeah, but I was a nurse and then I worked in ed tech and now I really wanna hone in on user research. ’cause I realize as a nurse and working in ed tech, I was doing a lot of research without the UX research job title. But you’re thinking, but no one’s gonna understand that.

And so. None of these proven strategies are going to work for me. Right? And that is what I mean by terminal uniqueness. And I get it. I myself often kind of talk myself in circles around why something is not going to work for me. But you are trying to make sense of your UX career path, right? You want to feel seen, which is a great, great goal.

’cause you have to feel seen and be seen to get hired in ux. Right? But this mindset of terminal uniqueness, it’s not helping you. It’s keeping you stuck. And the truth is, [00:05:00] almost everyone thinks they are the exception, right? And when you do this, you are wasting all of your time focusing on why you will not get hired instead of focusing in all that time and energy on taking the right action.

That actually will help you stand out and get hired. And, you know, my team and I think about this idea of terminal uniqueness all the time because it comes up so frequently and we’re always trying to think of new ways to communicate, this holds you back. And, you know, in life we’ve been told that success needs to look linear, right?

Like think back, you know. To when you were in elementary school or high school, or conversations with your parents or grandparents, success often meant a linear line, right? Like one field, one title, X number of years at a company, et cetera. A resume that follows a [00:06:00] very logical, that like hierarchical, career path.

And that is not the world we live in now. That is not how real life works. And that’s definitely not how the UX job market works, especially today. And UX recruiters and hiring managers are not like looking for perfect resumes and overly designed portfolios with like mythical results frankly, and projects that follow this proverbial perfect UX process all of the time because.

If you’ve worked in UX long enough, like I have, you know, the perfect UX process doesn’t exist, but those recruiters and hiring managers, they’re looking for UX candidates who can think, who can solve problems, who can like communicate well, who can get the job done right? And your job as a candidate is not to give them this boring [00:07:00] cookie cutter path, right?

That’s not the story they want to hear. Your job is to connect the dots for them about all these twists and turns and detours that frankly many people’s careers have taken, but help communicate to them how that has make, made you stronger in your career. How that has given you unique insight and perspective that you take into every job you do.

Right? Because at the end of the day, when it comes to recruiters and hiring managers. You are not selling like a perfect timeline of progression. You are selling you and your experience and experience is messy. And people want messy, especially in ux, right? Like we deal with so many different types of people, meaning users, customers, stakeholders, et cetera.

And sometimes those unique backgrounds that you have as a candidate can actually be [00:08:00] your asset and your superpower. So you have to figure out. How you communicate your unique blend of experience and skills and perspective and value. And in my UX career coaching program and job search accelerator, also known as Career Strategy Lab, this is exactly the type of work we do.

We work with people from all different backgrounds in ux, people switching into user experience. Especially if you’re listening to this and you have 15 or 20 more years of experience and you’re like, I have so much experience, I don’t even know how to make sense of it. Right? Some people have been teachers, some people were architects or attorneys switching into user experience, some of them working in user experience for 30 years.

But those different paths either into user experience or that your 30 year career has taken you. Those are not problems [00:09:00] and things to try and hide. They are just plot points on your journey, right? And journeys are messy. If you’ve mapped out customer journeys and experience journeys, you know, they’re messy.

But all those experience points are important and they provide color and context. To the bigger story and your plot points and detours and your story, they’re the foundation that we need to communicate across your resume, your portfolio, your LinkedIn in interviews. And so if you’re feeling like your story is a bit in a state of identity fog, then I want you to know you are not broken.

This is fixable and you don’t need to jump ship and leave the UX industry. And like it really, really pains me when I see LinkedIn posts of people who are saying that they think they’re gonna leave the [00:10:00] UX industry because they’re not getting interviews, they’re not getting hired. They feel like it’s too hard to get hired right now.

Because they have so much experience, right? And ageism is a whole other topic. But let me tell you, ageism does not need to be the reason you don’t get hired. It can actually be a superpower if you know how to position it, right? So if you’re struggling with identity fog, wondering, how do you communicate all of the unique things about your experience and your journey?

Into UX and throughout your possibly very lengthy UX career. Then I would love to help you inside Career Strategy Lab. And let me tell you some of the ways we do that, like the first sprint we do in career strategy lab is a design your career story sprint, because similar [00:11:00] to making a product, right, if you skip that research step of making a product.

Your team is going to likely need to do a lot of rework later because you didn’t do the research in the first place. This same thing applies to your job search, right? If you jump right into resume portfolio, LinkedIn networking, et cetera, but you haven’t dialed in this story you’re telling about yourself, everything you do is not going to either tell the right story or you’re gonna tell an in inconsistent story about yourself.

So after we do that initial design sprint where you’re designing your career story, then you are able to position your experience strategically. ’cause you know, and you have clarity on your experience, and then you can translate that to your resume portfolio, et cetera, right? As a result of that, you’re gonna be able to frame your story with more clarity and confidence, especially in interviews, [00:12:00] right?

You’re not gonna sit there feeling like an imposter. Before you click, you know, join on that Zoom meeting interview link, and you’re gonna be able to create that resume portfolio, et cetera, that tells the right story so you don’t sound like every other candidate and you become the obvious candidate.

Right? And this is not about falsifying the story of you. That would be ridiculous. This is just about owning your story. And to own it, you need to identify it. Sometimes you can’t see the forest through the trees and you need other people to help pull you out of the weeds and see the awesome story that is your career so far.

So if you’ve been thinking like, I am too unique, my background is too crazy, I think I’m just gonna leave ux, or you’ve been listening to every episode of this podcast and you’ve been hearing me talk about [00:13:00] career strategy lab. You listen to our case studies week after week of people who get hired, yet you still are

what if in yourself and thinking like, what if this doesn’t work for me or not even? What if just thinking this will not work for me because of X, Y, and Z? Then I just wanna give you some tough love and say you’re not that special, and that is frankly a good thing because you don’t need a totally unique solution.

That is tailored to you. You need a solid strategy for your UX job search that has a track record, which frankly I do. And that also helps you look at this holistically so you are able to communicate those unique things about you and get out of this trap of terminal uniqueness. And that is one of the things we do.

And frankly, when people. Get hired and pro give us feedback. [00:14:00] They say this is one of the most powerful things, designing their career story and seeing that all the things that they feel like are not an asset, meaning all of the things that make them unique and different. not a negative, it’s actually a positive.

So if you are curious about how my team and I can help you get hired in UX faster. Stop overthinking your past. Stop thinking that all of the things that are unique about you are a negative and not a positive. Then we would love to help you get out of this because whether you’ve been applying to jobs for two months, three months, three years, let me tell you, we can help you and we have the case studies to back it up.

So I wanna leave you with this. The goal is not to hide the things that are unique about you. The goal is to own it, and then after [00:15:00] you own it, you can position it in a way that’s gonna help you go from feeling like an invisible candidate to the obvious candidate. Because when you know how to communicate your story with clarity and strategy, you become unstoppable.

You feel like your story is your superpower. If you’re tired of feeling like you are the exception and you are never going to get hired, and if you’re ready to stop hiding behind all of these, I’m different For all these reason type thinkings that are swirling in your head, and instead start building a career story that really sells the product of you If you’re ready, then come join us inside Career Strategy Lab. You’ve probably heard about it before, but if you’re new to the podcast, career Strategy Lab is my UX Community and job search accelerator where we help candidates like you position themselves for five figure salary increases either now or [00:16:00] in the future, maybe at your performance review later this year.

So we help you turn your unique path. Into your biggest asset, and if you wanna learn more, just go to career strategy lab.com/apply and you will see everything related to what’s included more about the sprints, like that design your career story, sprint, what you get as such as eight critiques, access to our AI tool.

Our two live calls a week, our global alumni community of 750 people and so, so, so much more. Anyway, all the details are there, career strategy lab.com/apply. Hopefully it’s the day is the day that you put to rest this negative thinking of terminal uniqueness and see your experience as an asset and a superpower in your career.

Alright, that’s it for today. I will talk to you later. See ya.

Outro: Thanks so much for listening to the [00:17:00] Career Strategy Podcast. Now make sure to follow so you don’t miss an episode, and you can check out all of our episodes@careerstrategylab.com slash podcasts now to learn more about how to apply UX and product strategy to advancing your career. Whether that means leveling up in your current role, getting a new role, getting freelance work, or just being ready for the unexpected, then I invite you to watch my free UX job search workshop@careerstrategylab.com slash hired.

And please feel free to send me a DM on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you.

Post Roll: Hey there. Before I go, I wanna speak to you specifically if you’ve applied to 50, 100, 200 or more jobs and you haven’t secured an offer or interviews yet. First of all, I want you to know it’s not your fault. It is challenging out there and learning how to navigate the job, search, [00:18:00] interviews, negotiation, et cetera.

It is not something that we are taught. Your boss is too busy to help you. Your friends just give you vague advice. Your family doesn’t really know how hiring in UX works. This is why I created my career strategy lab, UX job search accelerator. If you are tired of your DIY approach. Not leading to the results you want, then I challenge you to consider.

Maybe it is time for a pivot, just like products pivot. Maybe your job search needs a pivot too. So head over to career strategy lab.com/apply to learn more or have a call with someone on my team or myself so we can answer all of your questions. Hope to talk to you soon.