I started as a UX/UI mentor in 2018 when my friend, also a designer, asked me to mentor the students together with her. I wasn't sure at that moment and I felt myself unqualified, but she encouraged me to give it a try. That was during the second year of my product design career, and now it's been two years and I’ve mentored over 200 students and helped them get into this industry. Many of them are now working at great companies.
I wasn't aware of how valuable it is to be a UX mentor and to help more new designers get into this field until the day I realized that it's not easy to get your first UX job right now, since more companies are requiring years of working experience that impede newcomers trying to enter this world.
I can understand that the companies don't want to invest time to cultivate new designers, but if we don't give new designers a chance, the industry will crumble.
I’ve given lectures about UI Patterns, guiding new designers in how to recognize different design patterns, how to apply them in the design and how to do design tradeoff. Why? Because nowadays hiring managers not only care about whether designers have a design thinking mindset, but also about calibrating the actual design work in the portfolio.
I’ve also networked with tech companies worldwide, such as Starbucks China, T3 Go, etc. We worked as a team to extract the needs of their business as the design requirements for my capstone project in this program. During the three weeks of the practical enterprise project, I supervised those students' work from understanding the problems and doing research and ideation to finally coming up with actual design solutions and delivering to clients.
