179: Feel Burnt Out & Invisible in Your UX Job Search? How Emmanuel Re-Entered the UX Job Market After a Career Break

Emmanuel: If you're applying for roles that you're really not qualified for, don't align with you. You're actually just polluting the applicant pool. I burnt myself out doing that. Like, I literally felt like my entire day, every week, every day of the week, including weekends, sometimes was like, dealing with, like, workday, uh, applications. But I've had inbound requests since at the end of last year when I had done all of those updates, which hadn't happened 12 months earlier.

Host: Hey. I'm Sarah Doody, 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, uh, 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, 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're in the right place to kick us off. I really would just kind of get a sense as to what you do in the world of user experience, kind of what you are doing now. So, Manuel, why don't you kick us off?

Emmanuel: Yeah. So before csl, I was looking for work. I had left a career at constant contact for 12 years. After that, I moved, I relocated, and that gave me a chance to take a career break. But also, once I decided to get back into the job search mode, the market was just so different than the last time I had searched, which was 2021, 2022, and that, um, it was just difficult to stay motivated, to feel like I knew what I was doing. Um, my background is I studied industrial design, but I'd mostly my entire career has been user experience design, interaction design turned into product and experience designer.

Host: And Emmanuel, you're located in Montreal, correct? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So close to where I grew up in Ottawa. Tell us some parallels between UX and industrial design. And how did you discover ux?

Emmanuel: Sure. I originally wanted to study architecture. And then in high school, while I was applying for schools in the States, my guidance counselor said, hey, you can apply to schools in Canada. Uh, and my art teacher was saying, hey, there's other fields of applied sort of art and engineering overlap because I like math and science and all that stuff too. So I found Carleton University, and at the time, I actually just wanted to do something that was more than just graphic design. And the idea of designing physical products really appealed to me, the program at Carleton is really comprehensive. It's in the school of engineering. One of the things that I think maps really well to the field of experience design, product design, whatever you want to call it nowadays that there is, I had to take ergonomics classes and psychology classes and those map very well to what people do outside of the design process. There's like the, the origins are in human computer interactions and that's a field or was a field within psychology. So I, I think I was pretty well prepared. When I graduated there weren't any entry level jobs. So it's a little bit like right now where it's really difficult to find entry level jobs in the field. It just happened to be. Industrial design was more difficult. I also studied in Canada, but also moved back to the States so I didn't have much of a network. It was a little bit more difficult. But I think the things that really map well is like you have to understand the medium that you're working with. So the materials in our case is like browser technology or native mobile app technology restrictions, really understanding humans and being curious on how they use the product and the other tools that they're using with whatever you're designing that it's really systems design thinking. And that's something that I was able to leverage and would brought a kind of an interesting perspective to my team. A lot of folks had studied visual media, graphics or something like that or had a background in software and I didn't, uh, so it led to really interesting conversations with early within my career. My mentor at the time happened to be somebody who had also studied architecture and got into ux.

Host: Emanuelle. I want to hear a little bit more about what you were doing before you joined Career Strategy Lab, so let us know about that.

Emmanuel: Yeah, so I, I took a, I took a deliberate career break just to, to, to relocate and get settled and stuff like that. And it was like December of 2024 where I sort of started. Here's, here's a version of my portfolio that I've put together. I thought, you know, take an old deck that I, that actually got me interviews back in 2021, convert that into a website and I used just a Google site with my domain and it was really simple to put together in my mind. But then I started realizing, am I telling the story correctly? So, so I spent three months more or less like on and off, like torturing myself to get that thing built. And it was mostly a content issue, it wasn't necessarily a uh, tools issue. Then I started applying for jobs January 2025, and I burnt out in three months because I was just so frustrated with, you know, sort of screaming into the void and not hearing back a lot. There's one role that I had applied for that I got really far in, but I was surprised that that was the only place that really wanted to continue interviewing me. I got to the very last round and it wasn't a storytelling thing in that case. It was just they were looking for somebody with more visual design experience for dashboards. And I just didn't know that and I didn't have that. And, uh, that was a huge blow to me. I just, I thought, okay, there's going to be more of these. And I kept on applying for jobs and one of the things I completely neglected was I was in the same job for 12 years. I grew my entire career from, you know, associate interaction designer to principal UX designer at one company and hadn't really updated my LinkedIn since, like 2017 maybe. And I undervalued how important that was. I was hitting a wall over and over again, not getting interviews, not really feeling confident in my assets, and just all by myself, in a sense. I had attended one of your sessions just like this, um, in March or April, early April of 2025. And I signed up, uh, because I thought the stories were really compelling. And that's maybe one of the things that really propelled me to at least join a community. As we get further into the conversation, we can see how that unfolded. But, um, that's. That was my prompt. It was like, I, I'd been following you for a while. Some of the content was in my feed, and I was like, oh, this is really interesting. There's somebody who has gone through the pain of looking for work and has done contract work, and they've honed their UX research skills to create assets that actually convert or at least give you a good starting point. And that was my problem, was like, not necessarily getting carried away with, like, making it look good or the visual design aspect. It was just like, how do I know that I'm. What I'm doing is actually going to be effective? And the iteration cycles were so long, so that was my jump into csl. And yeah, it's, it's helped me a lot in terms of that confidence building.

Host: Yeah. I think the stories that you shared are not different from so many stories of other people from Career Strategy Lab in that you were applying for 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, and you were getting interviews, but you weren't as you Said able to have these assets that were actually converting. I really like how you said, like, you have these really long iteration cycles between updating your resume, update your portfolio, et cetera. Emmanuel, I'm curious because you are actively interviewing and you said, you know, this has helped you create assets that converted and get out of this kind of long iteration cycles. Can you speak more to how Career Strategy Lab has helped you maybe increase those iteration cycles and be able to get interviews and move along in some of these interview processes?

Emmanuel: Sure. It's about being able to brag about yourself in like a, In. In. In a good way to actually take, not. Not only have like a cohesive message, but I think one of the things that really felt like I was struggling with was really owning that story and saying, well, I did have this impact. And one of the things that Sarah and the team have done really well in Career Strategy Lab is trying to get you to think creatively about how you brag about yourself or you talk about yourself and the impact that you've had. You might realize that you actually have had much bigger impact than just a number, like, you know, reductions in call support or something like that. I think one of the things that really helped me was looking at the three assets in parallel as opposed to sequentially. So, yeah, you kind of work on things sequentially, but have this. What is your about statement, or as it's called, uh, the compass statement. And Career Strategy Lab, which tries to focus you on what do you want to get back to, where do you want to go in your career, and, like, what matters to you and how do you like talking about X, Y and Z aspect of your niche in the design world. The resume, which I've redone so many times, and it's not about just tweaking it, but, like, that's the only thing that I've actually kept up to date over the years. And your LinkedIn profile. So those, those are sort of the three that I tackled first because it really worked on that presentation layer. How, what are you communicating? And as you're working on it, you start improving the message in one artifact and then you can translate that back into the other ones. Uh, I think the benefit of that was to get more concise on the message, shorter messages. And the biggest help that I found is, like, it's a twofold thing. You have the community, so you have your, your cohort, the fellow people that are enrolled in CSL at the time. You can post in the community and get feedback, which helps shorten the iteration cycle or Lower the barrier to, like, hey, is this good enough? But I really have to commend, um, the coaches to be like, hey, just submit something for critique. It doesn't have to be final, it doesn't have to be perfect. And I think having that option can really reduce the iteration cycles. And one thing that I learned pretty quickly is, like, it's okay to submit the same thing multiple times. So I submitted my compass statement twice, I submitted my resume twice, and I think I submitted my LinkedIn profile maybe twice. The thing I still struggled with was, like, telling the story of a very big project. And I think I can answer the two questions that have sort of come into the chat, at least from my perspective, is the idea of, I think any career coach will do. I think it just depends on what you're putting into it. This is giving you a bit more structure and knows the medium in which we work in. And there's plenty of people in the program who are more like design leaders or have leadership experience either at the manager level, the director level. I think there was a couple people, like, at the vp, like higher levels of design, uh, leadership. And the program isn't necessarily geared towards people who are at one level or another. It's like, it's whatever you put into it and you bring to it. And I think because Sarah and the team have seen so many different resumes and portfolios and all that stuff, that the speed of feedback that you get is increased in the sort of the preciseness. And it's all about so many different ways of saying the same story. I think that that's what's given me the creativity too, to the feedback I was getting from the community or from the coaches helped me just go with something different, something that I would have. Wouldn't have typed. Um, and instead of spending an entire day trying to write one bullet point, sure, generative AI tools help. And CSL itself also has tools that Sarah has built, but that just reduces that iteration cycle and can start building confidence relatively quickly. The perfectionism and the depth of, like, be wanting to try and communicate everything, but you have to cut something at some point. And I love how you can start. It takes work. But clarifying your message in the process of actually submitting these things for critique or sharing them with the community or just, even, even looking at the course material and how the worksheets are framed like, that's. That's just something that you could do on your own, but it would take a lot of effort, uh, more effort, and you can't actually Concentrate on that task.

Host: Yeah, I, I really. I was speaking with someone yesterday who doesn't work in this field, but I was describing what I do and I said, you know, I kind of see myself as like a product manager for a lot of people's job searches and careers. And part of what I really, I think I do, and maybe you guys tell me, is help you save time m and energy in, you know, getting hired, getting promoted, getting freelance work, whatever your goal is. Because I created this environment and system, if you will, where falling into those traps of perfectionism and overthinking and spending three hours or three weeks on a bullet point is really hard because there's a lot of accountability that happens. There's so many opportunities for feedback and sometimes, you know, you just need a human to tell you this is right or wrong. And that's not something that AI or Google search results can necessarily do.

Emmanuel: Yeah, the, the, the sort of. The nudge to move on.

Host: I love that.

Emmanuel: I think that, that, that was very beneficial because at uh, a. At a certain point I'd get back something from everything I submitted to critique. Basically came back with like, hey, you're good to move on to the next point. Even though I didn't feel like that. And granted it took like a really long time to get the first thing submitted for critique. And going to one of the questions that was talked about in, in terms of like, things that we would do differently in CSL or how we would use our time differently, I think using up all your critiques sooner rather than later only benefits you as a, as a participant. Because I was hoarding them because they were precious and it's like, oh my, you know, like, just because you get a cert a fixed number of them doesn't mean that you're not going to get value out of them. I ended up not using some of them, which is, I mean, it's on me. Like, it's unfortunate for me, but just not being precious about them. And maybe you post in the community first and get some first round of feedback and then you submit something. And like I said before, just submitting more of them or drafts can, can really help. And Sarah's been working really hard at trying to give you tools to expedite that process of like, because I did sit and looked at my compass statement for like three months. I wasn't working on it continuously for three months, but over the course of three months and that iteration cycle was much shorter with my. So it only took me a month and a half for my resume, and then it only took me like, three weeks for my LinkedIn profile. It then skyrocketed back up with. With the case study. But that's. It's just a different beast at that point.

Host: Okay, I want to go to a few questions in the chat here to see. So this was a good one. What, if anything, do you wish you'd done differently when you were in Career strategy lab? Emanuel mentioned critiques. Don't hoard critiques. Right. And it sounds like you broke yourself of that habit, but that's one that we could kick off with.

Emmanuel: Yeah, I can think of another one, which is. I think there's a little bit of an intimidation factor there. When you first start, you're joining. Like, one of the things I didn't really understand, but it's worth mentioning on this call, is that Sarah has open slots that open on a rolling basis because not everybody stays in the program for the same length. So when you start, you will end up with people who just started, maybe, and a ton of people who are at different steps in their own career journey, but also within, like, what they're focusing. Some people might just join CSL for. I need better case studies. That's all I'm going to focus on. Other people are taking the more holistic approach. And one thing I would have changed is I didn't have any, um, I had reservations about, like, being on camera and unmuting myself at the time. I also didn't feel like I could contribute anything because I was so new to the program. But I also was, I guess, in a sense, in a low point in my career where it's like, what do I have to say here? Like, everybody's work seems better than mine. Not holding oneself back, I think, is. Is that I'm not saying you have to turn on your camera or you have to engage in the calls, but, like, you get so much more out of it if you're engaging in the community in one dimension or another, whether

Host: it's

Emmanuel: talking during the weekly calls, submitting stuff for critique, critiquing other people's, or asking other people for feedback. And one, uh, thing I didn't take advantage of is asking tangential questions that are related to the job search. Like, people are asking about, like, I got this offer, like, should I take it or not? Is kind of like the summary. But then they get into detail of, like, why they're weighing certain things and they just want a second opinion, or they haven't heard back from, you know, the fifth and final round. They haven't heard back from the recruiter. There's some, there's a ton of other things that you can talk about in the community by posting your situation or like a video recording or projects that aren't necessarily related to the assets that you need to get your foot in the door and be interviewed. So those are my two other things.

Host: Yeah. It's not. The community is not just about discussions around like help me improve this bullet point. Um, there's a lot of discussions around confidence, around rejection, around imposter syndrome, around like, hey, I've been working in UX for 20 years, here's everything I've done. What do you guys think, you know, I should do next? And like it's not, it's. I uh, like how you said holistic because we approach this whole thing very holistically.

Emmanuel: Yeah. And it just. One of the things I didn't feel confident in is like I've been in the field for 12 years. There were other people in the field and just with the changing landscape with AI and so many people who've, who entered the field through boot camps in the last five years or even more, I guess seven years where like there has been a big boom and also a big bust because there hasn't been a lot of roles open, you sort of start wondering like, do I even belong in this field? And I found that passion again just because I was able to. How does it work with a bunch of people who are have less experience than me? It gave me an opportunity to mentor them. Setting up one on one coffee chats or mentoring sessions or co working sessions gave me like I felt valuable again, which I couldn't have if I was just diying it. Because who was I going to reach out to?

Host: The last question, the one that I really wanted to ask, did you find the investment required daunting when you didn't have a regular salary?

Emmanuel: Even if the effort of actually submitting the application, like preparing the materials and submitting it is quite, quite low, you then are exposing yourself to yet another rejection that you could have avoided because you have to be sort of honest and realistic with yourself. Like I have zero native app experience. Like I've never designed at scale for like an iOS or Android app, if that's what they're looking for. The product needs to be really good and I'd be able to pitch myself somehow, but chances are my 12 years of experience doesn't really count as 12 years of experience in their eyes. Um, that's just one example. Like there's a couple of roles that I applied for where it's like, it's design system specific. I've contributed to one, but I've never built one from scratch. I've never maintained one. Um, and those are really good filters. Like I've gone from I'll apply to any job I see to I'll apply to jobs that are in the small business space because that's, that's my experience for now. And like I don't want to stay in there forever. Like I'd love to work more like enterprise level or developer experiences. But that doesn't mean that I can do that right now. Like being realistic and putting your best foot forward. I think that that's. It is a daunting investment. I think for those that are on the call that presently have a job, know that there's layoffs coming or you just want to invest in your career. I think it's kind of a no brainer. I don't know the full financial situation but like obviously don't remortgage the house to do these sort of things. But that goes without saying for anything. Yeah, it's, it's a harder, a harder moment to say like I don't have an income and I spent an entire year sort of penny pinching and worrying about where, where my money was going. But I also kept myself stuck with that. I was like, no, I can't go to a cafe because to, to work, to get out of the house because that'll be another $4 or another $5 or whatever. And like that adds up. That's, that's going to happen no matter what. And if you get stuck in that mentality, it's, you know, find ways, maybe there's people who can support you a little bit or um, I do think it's worth a worthy investment in the sense that it's, it's a long term investment. Even though your program, in the time I am in the program might be limited. I've made some connections that I, I will have in my professional network for many, many years to come. I've tested myself a little bit in ways that I wouldn't have done that on my own. And that's given me, that's given me courage, it's given me confidence to actually move in the direction that makes most sense for me as opposed to just like feeling stuck.

Host: I know I said that was the last question, but now I have a follow up. So you brought up this topic of essentially playing the numbers game, right? Applying to high volume of jobs and Kind of rolling the dice, so to speak. When you change that approach, was there an impact to your confidence? Because what I find is, you know, if you're applying to tons of jobs, the numbers just say you're going to get more rejections. Right? If to your point, Emmanuelle, you're applying to some role that needs a decade of mobile experience and you have one year, I mean, you're probably going to get rejected. So was there a confidence shift when you also switched that approach from apply to fewer jobs with more of the right jobs?

Emmanuel: I think. I think it's. There's. There's a couple aspects of that for me, at least. One is I took my time career strategy lab as a deliberate pause in the race to apply for jobs, because I burnt myself out doing that. Like, I literally felt like my entire day every week, Every day of the week, including weekends, sometimes was like, dealing with, like, work day applications or whatever, you know, any of the three major other ones. And knowing how much effort you're putting in in some cases, like, even if I didn't answer a lot of the, uh, optional questions and position myself the best that I could, it was still taking me, like, 30 minutes, maybe for an application. And then you have to realize that because if you're applying for roles that you're really not qualified for don't align with you, you're actually just polluting the applicant pool, which, uh, is a different way of looking at it, that it might mean that some people who were qualified are now in the, like, discard pile just because there were too many applicants applications. So it's like you're doing a disservice to everybody, especially the poor recruiter that has to go through and look at the 300 applications that came in in 24 hours. Because it's a numbers game on the other side too. I am not taking the applic. The rejection so seriously anymore in the sense that, like, I don't know if my stuff got looked at. I just don't know. And if I can, like, not contribute to that problem, that's helping me boost my own confidence for, like, hey, I'm gonna try and do this. The networking aspect, like, trying to find more than one way to connect myself with a company instead of just praying that I've submitted 15 applications this week. But I've done have had no time or energy to connect with people that work there and leverage my network to get a stronger tie in connection. And I think that that's helped. The pause that I took was important. I have slowly Started ramping up applications again. I still struggle every now and then with like the confidence actually doing it, but I've had inbound requests since at the end of last year when I had done all of those updates, which hadn't happened 12 months earlier, people were like actually reaching out to me and quite a bit like, I got a dozen, uh, inbound requests. Sure, same thing. Some people are contacting me and like, that's not a match. They're like, I have no industrial design experience.

Host: Looking back, what do you wish you could have prioritized during your time in csl? I think we covered that. But is there any one or two word answers that jump out to you?

Emmanuel: Critiques and engagement. That was, that was it for me.

Host: Yeah, it's. CSL is organized in these sprints, which we recommend you do in a certain order. But it's not rigid. Like if you get an interview and it's two weeks from now, obviously go to the interview part of Career Strategy Lab. Like it's, you know, I give you the tools, I give you the knowledge, but you also have to, you know, use your own critical thinking and jump around and work on it linearly when it makes sense. So yeah, um, okay. When you run out of critiques, we currently don't have a way for you to do one off, like purchase one off critiques. That may change in the future, but for now there are no additional critiques. If you want to stay in Career Strategy Lab after your initial time is over, you can extend your time and get additional critiques. But I will say I just released these new AI tools inside of Career Strategy Lab to also help with that challenge in that there is a specific resume AI tool, a specific case study AI tool and a specific compass statement AI tool. And so I created those so that people could gut check with those if they were nervous about submitting critiques and using critiques or if you run out of them. Plus the community, like the community is so generous with providing feedback. So you will get awesome feedback from everyone else. And it's very high quality feedback because everyone is operating from the same, you know, set of instructions. And if you asked your peer for feedback on your resume and it's one page, they're going to say, why the hell's your resume one page? Sarah doesn't tell you to make a one page resume.

Emmanuel: Yeah, I think that's a good point. That because you're in the program and you've maybe been in the program a little bit longer than other people, you know, some of the Things that have been covered before, either in a live critique call or in a call recording or in the curriculum itself. Like it's not to say that you shouldn't, you should definitely go through the material before submitting something or at least informing yourself. But there's so much that you might miss something and the community can be like a, I guess it's like the, the oral history that gets passed down with each person that. Yeah joins. They, they, they then absorb the things. Like you don't need a one page resume. Or like how do you deal with contracting clients? How do you list that as experience and stuff like that. Like there's some really common ones that come up like literally every week.

Host: And I will say inside the community there is a pretty robust and accurate search feature, but there's also this AI tool in the community that is trained on all of the conversations in the community. You can say like has anyone has, has there been discussions about one page resume or how to create a portfolio for someone at the VP level, for example? It's also will help you connect with people. So you can ask it, I'm in Atlanta, are there any other CSL people in Atlanta? So don't be intimidated by the community because there are really great ways to help you navigate it and find relevant discussions and people, which is a huge, huge part of it. Someone asked, are you having to adjust CSL with AI involved? I think this question, we kind of just answered it. But I think also the question is around like with AI involved in hiring. And this is the article I've been meaning to write but don't have time to write. So I'll just say it. Uh, my stance is like all of this, I don't know, buzz about AI is ruining hiring. It's like no applicant tracking systems have existed for a long time and there's always, when you apply for a job, it's always been going into some database that is doing some level of assessing and vetting to help the recruiters and hiring managers. So that is my stance on AI in hiring. But I think all the more reason to make sure our resumes are optimized for these tools as I'm sure AI is, is helping them get hopefully smarter. Yeah. So not really, not much has changed in our approach other than I think people are just more aware that oh yeah, I have to design my resume for not just humans, but the algorithm too, which bracket AI. Right. But yeah, I think it's changed the

Emmanuel: environment more than the actual process of how you approach your. Like it's changed the environment of like. I think the volume that people are seeing is not just because of the layoffs, because it's incredibly easy to like, apply to a role now because you can automate some of the customizations and some people are not as diligent as others. So they're just customizing the stuff and sending it off and it looks and reads like AIs and that's mhm. Polluting the space. And the other thing is it's actually helped me personally. It's helped me a lot to have. I'm a cloud user and I help me work through those assets much faster because writing is not. I write in a very academic way and I want to be very detail oriented and I need that creative, like writing partner that can also look at patterns across other documents. Like, my resume was rewritten much faster because I didn't have to painstakingly work on each bullet one at a time. I already had a resume from before. How can I adapt it to this? You know, am I following the framework that. That Sarah has has vetted over the years? Which bullet points are weak? And one thing I asked is like, what? Can I cut any bullet points? And it said yes. And then I said, well, hold on, this is the actual context behind it. And I would tell it, the actual context is like, wait a minute, there's a different story here. So it's changed that for me more so I feel it's made me more confident in being able to work through things that feel like a chore as opposed to. I don't feel some sort of existential crisis as often. The more and more you. You realize that humans are still quite needed because it's just all patterns that they're. The, the algorithms are working against. There's only so much context that they can use in one go. Yeah, we have way more context and it's permanent in our brains as these tools.

Host: That's a good point. Like, I think some of what we do in CSL is educate you as to how to use AI, whether it's our AI tools or Cloud or ChatGPT or whatever. But I think CSL helps you use those tools more, um, efficiently because you're able to kind of give it better prompts, give it better context, et cetera. So yes, thank you for adding that. That part of the answer. Hey there. I just wanted to say thanks for listening to this episode all the way to the end. If you're looking for links or a resour sources mentioned, visit careerstrategylab.com podcast to find this episode details and the details of the hundreds of other episodes. If you're looking for help with your UX or product job search, you may want to consider checking out my Program Career Strategy Lab, where I help UX and product people just like you navigate unexpected challenges in their careers, whether that's a layoff, trying to get promoted, or getting hired without applying to hundreds of jobs. To learn more about that, just go to careerstrategylab.com and click UX Career Coaching at the Very top. That's all for today, and I will see you next time in another episode of the Career Strategy Podcast.