A few years ago one of the hottest topics in the UX space was how to land a job in user research. But with ongoing market shifts, the conversation has evolved.
According to The State of User Research 2024 report, nearly half (49%) of respondents said their organizations experienced layoffs in the past 12 months, with 22% reporting that researchers were affected (source). As a result, many UXRs are now curious about how their skills could transfer to roles outside of research and UX altogether.
In this post, I'll help you explore the transferable skills you already have in your toolbox, how to map your skillset to new opportunities, and identify roles that align with your passions.
Transferable skills
As a user researcher, you’ve likely spent years honing your craft. It can feel daunting to consider a switch, but your hard work has built a skillset that's highly transferable to other industries and roles. Let’s dive into some of the skills in your toolbox.
Soft Skills
Soft skills are at the heart of user research—the non-technical skills that influence how you work and interact with others. These skills, developed through lived experience, include:
- Curiosity: Research is about learning. UXRs are naturally driven to explore the unknown, ask questions, dive deep, and stay open to unexpected insights
- Active Listening: You’ve mastered the ability to hold space for others and understand their experiences. This skill is helpful when gathering insights, building relationships, and solving challenges
- Collaboration: Research doesn't happen in isolation. You work cross-functionally with designers, product managers, and developers, building trust and rapport across multiple departments and teams
- Problem Solving: With a user-first mentality, you address pain points and identify opportunities for improvements
Hard skills
Hard skills are technical abilities gained through training, education, and practice. These are typically competency-based and easier to measure. As a researcher, you likely excel at:
- Research + Experiment Design: Crafting and planning studies to answer specific questions, you typically use UX research methods like surveys, interviews and observations
- Analysis: Identifying patterns and themes from qualitative data or analyzing quantitative metrics like task success rates. If you're familiar with UX research tools like SPSS or R, you're already set up for data-heavy roles
- Wireframing + Prototyping: If you have a design edge, you may have basic prototyping skills in tools like Figma or Sketch
- Storytelling: You excel at presenting findings through research reports, presentations or slide decks, turning data into actionable insights for your organization
Exploring Potential Career Paths
When I speak with UXRs about potential transitions, I encourage them to reflect on what drew them to user research and what parts of their role they enjoy the most. Some potential paths to consider include data analysis, product management, and customer success, which we’ll cover in more detail here.
Data analysis
Researchers with a quantitative edge can transition into data analysis roles, making sense of numbers and uncovering actionable insights.
Maria Kamynina, a former UXR turned data analyst, described her user research role as naturally wearing many hats. Alongside conducting qualitative and quantitative research, she applied analytics to scope studies and quantified results. She enjoyed this part of her work so much she decided to shift to data analytics.
Now as a data analyst, she approaches her projects with a researcher's mindset—she has built stakeholder relationships to understand their needs and build fitting reports, works with large datasets to uncover insights, and answers complex questions. Since making the switch, Maria described analytics being a good balance between solo and people-facing work and the potential to make an impact is more amplified with analytics.
Product management
Product managers are the conductor of their team. They spend their time focusing on strategy, stakeholder alignment, and product vision. Your communication skills, stakeholder management and user empathy will help you thrive in this role.
And if you enjoy problem-solving and big picture thinking, this might be your next step!
Paolo Appleby, former UX designer turned Product Manager, described UX as only one part of creating a product (and business) to solve a problem for people. He wanted to be closer to making the decisions about what problems to solve and when.
He attributes skills such as listening and identifying patterns as helping him within his product work today. Paolo mentioned that Product Management is often stereotyped as wearing lots of hats and while it can be true, he's also had the chance to spend extended periods of time on interesting problems (which often wasn't the case in his UX work).
Melissa Kain, Product Manager at SmartLeaf, describes noticing the job market shifting a lot post-COVID and deciding to widen her job search to include all roles in product development. “I'm glad I landed in product management because it allows me to still be a user advocate and researcher while taking on a variety of other product-centric responsibilities, like maintaining a roadmap and participating in product development. My UX skills have been valuable in my role. Being comfortable with talking to clients and users and knowing how to structure a research session comes in handy”.
Product marketing
Storytelling and creating narratives that connect products and customers is central to product marketing. Your ability to understand user behavior and translate it to engaging messages will be your key to success in this role.
Ben Wiedmaier, Senior Content Marketing Manager at User Interviews, describes “a challenging (tight, competitive, evolving) market forced me to expand my search for positions, ultimately leaving academia. I learned how prevalent and important “research” skills—the trio of reading, digesting, and synthesizing information—are to businesses. I’m still doing many of the activities I loved about my research career—like listening, framing incisive stakeholder interview questions, gathering information, and conducting research analysis—just with a slightly different purpose and frame.”
Customer Success
If you enjoy building relationships, customer interviews, and helping clients achieve long term success, you can utilize your skills in empathy, active listening, and problem solving to succeed in a customer success role.
It’s important to keep in mind, you'll likely be measured on client satisfaction, renewals or sales metrics. This can come as a shock after being in research for some time.
Matthew Bahner, former Market researcher turned Customer Success Manager, described always coming back to client interactions and relationships as being the most rewarding parts of his work: “Empathy and communication were both critical UX skills that I found myself applying during my transition into CS. Empathy—not only for myself as I was making a significant shift into the world of SaaS CS—but ongoing empathy for my customers and their needs. During the transition, I also found myself enhancing my communication skills to work more effectively with cross functional stakeholders and leaders within my company.”
Freelance/solopreneurship
If you value autonomy, freelancing lets you work directly with clients and craft your own projects. While you’ll need to develop your sales and marketing skills, your ability to deliver insights and solutions is a strong foundation for you to build on.
Lex Roman, a growth designer-turned-marketer, describes knowing it was time to make a shift because in her mind her “UX career had run its course. I was solving the same problems at every company and the only thing that was different was the people. I needed a new kind of challenge and wanted to stop working with tech companies”. She used her design skills on her website, graphics, and customer research to inform her consultancy. She describes herself as being more versatile and adding more skills to her toolbox.
Jennifer Sullivan, a UXer turned Internal Family Systems (IFS) Practitioner and Coach, describes approaching her business with a testing mindset, “which I definitely learned during my early days in web design. It helps me to depersonalize setbacks in my business and focus on what can be improved in the long term.”
Making the transition
Career transitions can feel like an identity shift, especially when you've spent years honing your craft. But by focusing on the skills you already have and aligning them with roles that excite you the process can feel empowering.
I encourage you to:
- Reflect on your passions: these are the aspects of user research bring you the most energy
- Leverage your skills: understand your hard and soft skills when exploring new opportunities
- Embrace your curiosity: remember to stay open minded to different possibilities and what might be next
Your expertise is far more transferable than you may realize. With a clear understanding of your strengths and aligning them to your next role, you can confidently carve out your next right step.
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