<aside> 💡 Hey Parisa,
It was great chatting with you the other day. I hope you found our conversation insightful and inspiring and it gave you the energy to approach your job hunt in the best way possible!
Take your time to go through them and don’t feel pressured to having to do it all straight-away. Best of luck in your next few weeks and trying to land a role!
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I wanted to first give you some points on your portfolio. Overall I really like it and it looks really well built and interesting, especially because it showcases your personality as well as some really mature elements.
As discussed, make sure to update the Work section with as many case studies as possible that showcase your approach to different projects, but also highlight how flexible you are when dealing with the “design process”. It’s important that you prioritise the projects based on the type of work you want, so put higher up on the list those types of projects you want to work more on.
As we mentioned, try to implement more of your personal branding, developing a more unique style that could help you stand-out, from a visual point of view, so that people can remember you easier. Here’s a direct link to some inspiration of stand-out visual branding for portfolio websites:
Make sure you call out your past experience (non-design related) and how it shaped you as a professional, all the things you learn and that showed you how to apply values that are transferrable to the role of a UX designer (example: empathy dealing with clients, understanding people’s needs, etc).
If you’re looking for work to complement your portfolio, here are two of the main platform I’ve used in the past to do some volunteering work. The variety of projects is quite diverse and I’m sure you can find an interesting one related to those “main topics” of your interests that we discussed.
Catchafire: Skills-Based Virtual Volunteer Matching
How & where to find UX design volunteer opportunities - UX Design Institute
I also wanted to share a couple of agencies hiring in London, if you ever consider making the jump. In addition to checking their sites, look them up on LinkedIn and if you click on People, make sure to connect with some recruiters hiring UX/UI designers.