My entry into this industry started, and I want to be very clear that this is true and not a bit, in World of Warcraft.
I was the healing officer on a mythic raiding guild, which meant that on top of keeping a twenty-person raid team alive through fights that punished the slightest half-second of hesitation, I was also responsible for building the addon setup that let me actually do that:
- custom unit frames
- threat trackers
- cooldown timers
- incoming damage
Plus a dozen tiny information streams all fighting for the same real estate on one screen, arranged so I could parse a wall of health bars mid-crisis without my brain falling over.
Every time an addon update dropped, the guild Discord turned into an impromptu design crit. Everyone posting screenshots of their revamped UIs, half showing off, half quietly asking "does this look insane or is it just me."
I became the person people brought their UIs to before posting, and not just the other healers — tanks and DPS too, people whose entire information priorities were completely different from mine.
Without knowing the term for it yet, I was doing user research across different roles with genuinely different needs from the same interface.
One night, mid-flex in that same Discord, a guildie said, with the sort of casual authority you only get from someone who has no idea they're about to redirect your entire career, "your UIs are so good Messa, you should do it for a job."
I did not know that "having a good UI" was a transferable skill. I certainly didn't know it was a job. But it rattled around in my head long enough that I started dusting off my old graphic design skills, studying with Lindsay Marsh on Udemy, which propelled my real interest in UI design.
It's hard to study UI design without UX, if you're doing it properly.
Once I realised the "why" behind the interface I actually found addictive.
I was a guitar teacher at the time, running activities in a school teaching basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript, as well as Graphic Design, and in 2022 I decided, with the calm confidence of someone who has genuinely no idea what she's getting into, that I was going to become a UX designer properly. I signed up for the Google UX Design certificate.
I spent hours in Figma and XD designing these genuinely exciting mobile and web apps, but that's all they were: designs. I knew how to code a bit but I was getting frustrated that my apps that could solve genuine life problems were just sat there.
This led me to push myself again and learn full-stack development through IT Career Switch and Codecademy, because apparently one career leap wasn't dramatic enough.
I now run a UX and web dev freelance practice, I've built and shipped multiple apps, and I deliver digital skills training through Enterprise Cube, the York and North Yorkshire Growth Hub, and LX Foundry — which means a meaningful chunk of my working week is now spent helping other career-switchers do the thing I did.
So I've had a lot of time to reflect on what I got right, what I got needlessly wrong, and what I'd say to the version of me who was three weeks into that certificate, mildly panicking, and Googling "do I need TypeScript."
This is that letter. I'm publishing it because if you're reading this as a recruiter wondering whether a non-traditional path produces a worse designer, my answer is a very confident no — but the path is inefficient in specific, fixable ways, and I'd like to save someone else the detour.
You will waste weeks worrying about whether you're "allowed" to call yourself a designer
Nobody warns you about this one, and it should be the first slide of every career-change course. There is a specific, low-grade dread that sits behind every project during a career switch, and it's not "can I do this" — it's "am I allowed to say I can do this yet."
I spent an embarrassing amount of energy in month two deciding whether I could put "UX Designer" in a bio when I hadn't been paid for it. I want to tell past-me: that question has no correct answer and asking it is itself the waste of time. Nobody is checking your credentials at a door. The people hiring you are checking your case studies. Spend the anxious energy on the case study instead of the job title, because one of those things is actually visible to an employer and the other one is a feeling you're having in the shower.
The certificate teaches you the process. It does not teach you what happens when the process meets a real person
The Google cert is genuinely solid — the five-phase design process, the empathise-define-ideate-prototype-test structure, all of it holds up. What it can't teach you, because it's a course and not a job, is what happens when a real stakeholder tells you your beautifully researched user flow doesn't work because "the client won't like it," or when your usability testing reveals something the brief explicitly told you not to touch.
I'd tell past-me: the course is your scaffolding, not your ceiling. The actual skill you're building isn't "can you execute the five phases," it's holding onto the reasoning behind the process when the real world refuses to cooperate with the tidy version.
That instinct only comes from doing it on messy, real projects with real limitations — no amount of extra course content substitutes for going and doing three actual client projects, badly, and learning from the bruises.
Nobody cares about your career change story except you, and that's fine
This one stings a little to admit, but it's useful: I over-indexed, early on, on the narrative of my switch. I thought "guitar teacher becomes UX designer" was such an interesting hook that it would do a lot of the work for me. It doesn't. Hiring managers are busy, and a compelling backstory gets you about four seconds of goodwill before they go back to looking at your portfolio like everyone else's.
Your career-change story is a garnish, not the meal.
It's genuinely worth one good line in a cover letter or an "about" page, and it's worth absolutely nothing if the case studies behind it don't hold up on their own merits. Ironically, this post works because I've since built a body of real, technical, well-documented work — Wise Mind, Mirian, client sites — that the story sits on top of. Four years ago, the story was doing all the lifting because there was nothing underneath it yet, and that's a shakier place to build a career from than it feels like at the time.
You will learn to code faster than you'll learn to stop apologising for your opinions
Doing the full-stack bootcamp after the design cert was, in hindsight, one of the best decisions I made — not because every UX designer needs to code, but because understanding what's actually hard to build changes what you're willing to ask for as a designer. I stopped drawing wireframes that were technically fantasy the moment I understood what a component actually costs to maintain.
But the harder skill, and the one nobody puts on a syllabus, was learning to state a design opinion without three qualifying clauses in front of it.
Softening a professional opinion into a question isn't humility — it's just noise that makes people trust your judgement less.
Early on, every piece of feedback I gave sounded like "this is just my thought, and I could be totally wrong, but maybe possibly the button could be bigger?" I'd tell past-me: you did the research. You ran the test. You're allowed to say "the button needs to be bigger" as a sentence, full stop, and let the room disagree with you if they want to.
The people who "aren't real designers yet" are usually the best people to learn from
Now that I'm on the other side of this, running training through Enterprise Cube and the Growth Hub, I spend a lot of time with people at exactly the stage I was at in 2022 — mid-career-change, credentialed but not yet employed in the field, quietly convinced everyone else in the room is further along than they are.
Here's the thing I didn't expect: they are, almost without exception, sharper observers of bad design than people five years into the industry, because they haven't yet been trained to accept a bad pattern just because "that's how it's always done."
The thing you think is your weakness — that you came from somewhere else — is going to be one of your actual advantages.
A career-switcher coming from teaching, nursing, retail, hospitality — any job that's fundamentally about reading a room and solving a human problem in real time — usually walks in with better instincts for empathy and friction than a lot of design-school graduates who've mostly practised on briefs rather than people.
What I'd actually change, concretely
If I could hand my 2022 self a shorter, more efficient version of the last few years, it would look like this:
- Find one real person with a real problem to design for, even for free, as early as possible — rather than perfecting certificate projects in isolation.
- Stop asking "am I a real designer yet" and start asking "is this case study good enough to show a stranger."
- Learn to code to understand constraints, not to become a developer instead of a designer — those are different goals, and conflating them slows you down on both fronts.
- Say your opinions as opinions. Save the hedging for when you're genuinely uncertain, so it still means something when you use it.
- Stop treating your unconventional background as something to explain away. It's the reason your portfolio doesn't look like everyone else's — in a crowded field, that's the entire point.
If you're a recruiter reading this because a candidate's CV has a career gap or a "previous life" in a completely different field: that background is not a liability you need to look past. In my experience — both as the switcher and now as the person training the next batch of them — it's usually the single strongest predictor of someone who'll notice the thing everyone else in the room has stopped seeing. Hire for that instinct. The tools, we can teach.