- This video is my advice for all you UX students out there.
If you already graduated, sorry, it's too late.
I strongly recommend getting several internships
while you are still a student.
This is probably good advice for students in any field,
but internships are particularly important for UX students
because universities are pretty bad at teaching our topic.
Practical skills and work experience
are much more important than theory
for job performance as a UX specialist
and you learn these best by doing UX in a company,
not by sitting in a classroom.
When I hire entry-level UX staff,
one of the main things I look for on a resume
is what internships a candidate has had.
Should you go back to the same company
for several summers or take different internships each year?
Now, that's harder to say.
Being hired by the same company two or three times
definitely shows that the student
must have done a great job the first time.
But there's also something to be said
for gaining experience from several different environments.
Assuming you have enough offers,
you should probably make the decision
based on how well you were treated last year.
If you really learned a lot,
then do go back for one more internship
because that was a good company
and there are definitely a lot of bad internships out there.
But if you are an undergraduate student,
you can have three internships,
so I would recommend trying at least
two different companies rather than staying
with the same company three years in a row.
Should interns be paid?
We always pay our interns in Nielsen Norman Group.
But if you're an undergraduate freshman
looking for an internship after only one year of school,
you probably know so little that you may be better off
with an unpaid internship at a good place
where you can really learn instead of a paid internship
at a lesser place.
Now towards the end of an undergraduate program,
or if you're a grad student,
it is reasonable to look to be paid.
That signals that the company is serious about its interns.
I personally had two internships
when I was a student long ago.
Plus, I also worked as a teaching assistant
during the school year.
In retrospect, I regret not having had more internships.
Being a teaching assistant was great
because you learn any material much better
by teaching it than by studying it.
And I worked for a great professor.
He invariably wore a bow tie,
which shows you how old school he was.
He really helped me get into my first teaching job
and I was lucky enough, it was a small course
so that I was the only TA which got me even closer
to the professor's approach to developing his course.
Even though I liked being a teaching assistant,
this job cannot substitute for being an intern
because it is highly academic and focused
on teaching rather than doing.
If you can land a TA job, do take it,
because it is during the school year
and presentation skills are super important for UX work.
But focus your efforts for the summer
on getting internships with real companies.
My two internships were with IBM and CERN,
the European Nuclear Research Center.
Even though CERN is mainly a physics lab,
it also has a great computer department
which is where the worldwide web was invented.
I should say that I did not have anything to do
with the invention of the web because my internship
was 10 years before the web even started.
CERN organized an elaborate program
for the interns all summer
besides our individual projects.
There were lectures by Nobel Prize winners,
and by one of the original inventors of the atom bomb
during World War II.
IBM also had arranged a big formal program
for its interns even back in 1981 when I was there.
I think today they do even more.
But even though it's nice when a company arranges
a lot of activities for its interns,
I don't think this should be the deciding factor.
when you choose where to go.
You can learn more from being in a small company
with no extracurricular activities,
but where you become a core contributor to a project.
Similarly, even though I do recommend paid internships,
don't make the salary a deciding factor.
The difference between a good and a bad internship
where you learn a lot or a little is worth big dollars
for your first few real jobs,
much more than any pay difference
during a three-month internship.
I also don't think that the hope of getting a job
at the same company after graduation
should be a deciding factor.
Yes, many companies do use their internship programs
as a recruiting pipeline.
But for the student, the learning opportunity
and the resume building should be the top two concerns.
You may very well decide that the company
is not where you want to work full time,
even if you had a great internship
that will help you secure a better match
someplace else after graduating.
Case in point, Nielsen Norman Group
only hires 10% of our interns.
I view it as my sacred duty to make sure
that my interns learn a lot,
particularly of the things they don't get at university.
When somebody has been an NN/g intern,
you know they have been drilled in solid methodology.
But our company is so super elitist,
that it's not for most people to work here.
But all our past interns have gone on
to superb UX jobs and stellar careers
so I feel good that I helped them at a critical time
even if they did not join my team.
Some of our interns even decided
that they did not want to focus
on user research after having tried it for a summer.
That's fine, and one of the key possible outcomes
of an internship.
If you follow my advice to have multiple internships,
that's a great way to try out some different subspecialties
within the UX profession
before you have to commit to specialize full-time.
One last issue, avoid internships
where you will not be mentored
by a seasoned UX professional.
In fact, it's best to join a company
with a full-fledged UX department
with multiple experienced UX specialists
and a professional UX manager.
Professional leadership and professional mentorship
mean that you will actually learn something useful.
In contrast, if you get raised by wolves,
you will learn very little
and you may even learn something that's wrong
and give you bad habits that can be hard to shake later.
So avoid internships where you will only be working
with non UX-ers.
My most important advice to all UX students
is get those internships.
The more the better.