How to write a CV for a UX designer role

The portfolio link is doing more work than your CV

For most jobs, the CV is the whole application. For UX design, it is the index page. A hiring manager or design lead will look at your CV for perhaps thirty seconds before deciding whether to open your portfolio, and if the portfolio link is missing, buried in a footer, or password-protected with no note on how to get in, the application usually stops there. Put the link at the top, near your name, not in a "contact" block at the bottom. If your portfolio is a PDF rather than a live site, say so, because a hiring manager who expects a URL and finds a PDF request will often not chase it.

What they're checking when they click through is not your visual polish first. It's whether you can show a process: a problem, the research that defined it, the decisions you made and why, and what happened as a result. A CV that lists tools and job titles but whose portfolio is a gallery of finished screens with no reasoning attached tells an experienced reviewer that you can execute but not that you can think. That distinction is the one this whole hiring process is built around, more than in most design-adjacent roles, because the job itself is reasoning about users under constraints, not just producing artefacts.

What to put in the first third of the page

Before anything else, a UX hiring manager is scanning for three things: what kind of UX you do, what stage of product you've worked at, and what you were responsible for versus what you contributed to.

"UX designer" covers people who do user research, interaction design, service design, and product design under one title, often with real differences in daily work. If the advert asks for someone who runs their own usability testing and synthesises findings into design decisions, and your experience is mostly translating requirements into high-fidelity screens with research handed to you by someone else, say that plainly rather than letting the title imply otherwise. If you specialise in a particular area, such as accessibility or design systems, name it near the top rather than letting it surface only in a case study several scrolls down.

Stage of product matters more in this field than the job title suggests. Designing the first version of a feature that doesn't exist yet is a different skill from redesigning a checkout flow used by an established user base, and hiring managers read your work history for signals of which you've done. If you worked at a startup, name roughly how early it was (pre-launch, post-seed, scaling) rather than just the company name, because company names age and don't travel outside your own network.

Ownership versus contribution is the third scan. "Led the redesign of the onboarding flow" and "contributed wireframes to the onboarding redesign led by a senior designer" are both legitimate, common experiences, but a CV that blurs the two erodes trust the moment the interviewer asks a follow-up question and the story doesn't hold up. Say which parts were yours: the research plan, the information architecture, the final visual design, the handoff to engineering. If you worked solo without a research team or a design system to lean on, that's also worth stating, because it shows range that a large-team designer may not have.

How experience is actually evidenced in this field

UX doesn't have a licensing body or a standard qualification the way regulated professions do, so hiring managers rely almost entirely on evidence you supply yourself: the portfolio, named methods, and named outcomes.

On methods: naming the specific research or design methods you used is more useful than describing the outcome in adjectives. "Ran five moderated usability sessions and two rounds of card sorting to restructure the navigation" tells a reviewer something concrete about your process. "Improved the user experience through research-led design" tells them nothing they can question or verify. The same applies to tools: naming Figma, Sketch, Miro, UserTesting, Maze, Hotjar or a specific analytics platform is fine and expected, but it's the least informative line on the CV. Every candidate lists tools. Almost none show what they did with them.

On outcomes: state a measured change where you genuinely have one, and describe it honestly, including what you can and can't attribute to your work alone. If a redesign coincided with a drop in support tickets or an increase in task completion, say so and say who measured it (product analytics, a research team, a stakeholder report), because an unattributed number reads as invented even when it isn't. If you don't have a measured outcome, don't manufacture one. "Reduced the number of steps in the checkout flow from six to three, which the product team reported anecdotally reduced support queries" is honest and still useful. Not every project ends with a clean metric, and hiring managers who've done this work themselves know that.

On evidence of collaboration: this field expects you to have worked closely with product managers and engineers, often through the same rituals — design critiques, sprint planning, handoff documentation — and a CV that never mentions this reads as someone who worked in isolation. If you maintained or contributed to a design system, say what parts, because "worked with a design system" and "built the component library other designers use" are very different claims.

Qualifications, certificates, and what they actually signal

There's no licence or registration for UX design, and no certificate substitutes for a portfolio. That said, certain credentials do signal something specific to people hiring in this field, and it's worth knowing what each one actually tells a reader.

A degree in human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology, industrial design, or a related field signals grounding in research method and user cognition that self-taught designers sometimes have to demonstrate through their work instead. It's not a requirement — this field hires heavily from bootcamps and career-changers — but where you have it, it's worth naming plainly rather than burying it under unrelated modules.

Courses from the Nielsen Norman Group (UX Certification) or the Interaction Design Foundation are recognised by people who've been in the field a while, largely because they're rigorous rather than short. A single online course completion certificate from a general platform is unlikely to carry the same weight, and listing several short courses can read as compensating for a thin portfolio rather than adding to it. If you have a Nielsen Norman or IxDF certificate, name the specific credential, not just "UX certification," because the specific name is what an experienced reviewer recognises.

Accessibility knowledge is worth naming explicitly if you have it — familiarity with WCAG standards, experience designing for screen readers, or having run an accessibility audit — because it's increasingly asked for directly in adverts and rarely demonstrated well on CVs even when candidates have done the work.

What doesn't help: a long list of software proficiencies with no context, a personality-type framework (design thinking mindsets, Myers-Briggs, and similar), or a generic "passionate about solving user problems" line. None of these are specific to you, and an experienced hiring manager reads past them without pausing.

What candidates from this background routinely leave out

The most common gap is failure states. Every UX designer has shipped something that didn't work, tested a hypothesis that turned out to be wrong, or had a design overridden by a business constraint they disagreed with. Leaving this out entirely, and presenting every project as a clean success, is one of the fastest ways to read as junior or as someone who hasn't yet worked on anything with real stakes. A single line describing a decision you'd make differently now, or a constraint you had to design around, does more for credibility than another success story.

The second gap is the handoff. Many UX designer CVs stop at the prototype and never mention what happened when it went to engineering — whether the design shipped as specified, what got cut, what you learned from the built version versus the mockup. Hiring managers who've shipped products themselves know that the gap between design and shipped product is where a lot of the real skill shows, and its absence from a CV is noticeable.

The third is scale and constraint. "Designed a mobile app" says little. Designing for a product with an established user base and legacy technical debt is a different problem from designing something greenfield, and stating which one you were doing tells the reader far more about the actual difficulty of the work than any adjective would.

What to do next

Open your CV and check the top third against what's above: portfolio link visible, UX specialism named if you have one, product stage stated, ownership made explicit for each role. Then open your portfolio itself and check that at least one case study shows a decision that didn't work first time, and at least one shows what happened after handoff. If you're applying to several roles with meaningfully different UX specialisms — research-heavy versus visual-design-heavy, for instance — it's worth having more than one version of the CV rather than one that hedges across all of them. jobmarket.pro reads each advert in full and builds the application from your actual project history rather than a single fixed CV, which is one way to handle that without rewriting it from scratch each time.