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Building my Skill Graph
Building my Skill Graph

A how-to guide on building your designer Skill Graph

Colin Pace avatar
Written by Colin Pace
Updated over a week ago

Your Skill Graph showcases the overall strength, skills, and areas for improvement of your designer skill set, benchmarked against 220K+ designers across Uxcel, worldwide!

Our Skill Graph covers 6 main categories:

  • UX Research

  • Visual Design

  • Interaction Design

  • Content Strategy

  • Leadership

  • Core Qualities

All of our lessons, courses, and assessments are directly impacting these 6 categories, showing you how strong and proficient you are in these areas, giving you a bird-eye view of what you can bring to the table, and what you can improve to make your design skills better.

Building my skill graph

The first step to build your Skill Graph is to take a Verified Designer Assessment.

Verified Designer Assessment is built to quickly test your skills across all 6 categories of the Skill Graph, so you can immediately see where you stand with your skills. It takes you 20 minutes to complete the Verified Designer Assessment, and get your initial Skill Graph mapped out.

Once you get your initial Skill Graph mapped out, you can start improving your skills by engaging with our learning content. All of our lessons, courses, and assessments are directly impacting these 6 categories, showing you how strong and proficient you are in these areas, giving you a bird-eye view of what you can bring to the table, and what you can improve to make your design skills better.

Every category has recommended courses, skill + skill graph assessments, and challenges that are directly contributing to this specific category. There are more learning materials that directly contribute here, and these are the recommended ones that can help you get started when building your personal skill graph!

What are the benefits of building your skill graph?

Modern design teams are taking a “hospital training approach”, where they are pairing professionals that are proficient in a specific skill set with others that would like to improve that same skill set.

This way, you can easily plug into your team culture, as you can show what are the areas you’re strongest at. This can help you with:

  • Getting your manager to include you in the projects you’d like to be a part of

  • Pitch your idea to win that freelance gig you’re willing to take

  • Show to your HR and manager how your skills grew over time and why you deserve a fat raise

  • Finding a perfect mentor to help you improve the skill you’re weakest at.

Tips & Tricks for building you Skill Graph

We’d like to show you 3 simple ways you could make sure you get the most out of your skill graph:

Asking your manager and HR for a salary increase

If you're a junior or medior climbing the career ladder, performance and learning are crucial for your career growth. Showing your progress to your manager and HR can help you get your desired salary increase, as you can show them how your skills were growing month over month, and what was the exact impact on your design output you provided. There’s not a single solution besides Uxcel that allows you to show your learning progress to your managers, and help them see the correlation between learning and design outputs!

Getting yourself involved in the projects you love

Every manager wants to allocate the most proficient designers on the projects they are suited for. By sharing your Skill Graph with your manager, you can pitch why you’re the go-to person for this project, how you can contribute, and why they need to get you involved. Whether it is a freelance gig, or an in-house project, you can directly showcase your skills and get yourself involved in the projects you like the most.

Finding a perfect mentor for yourself

Seeing where you can improve is the biggest motivator you can get. With Skill Graph, you can uncover exact skills that you want to improve, and find a mentor that can directly impact the skills you’re missing out on. Data-driven approach will do miracles with your career!

Wrapping it up

Skill Graph can help you:

  • Understand where you stand with your skills

  • Introduce peer learning and mentoring, so you can personalize your career paths

  • Get yourself involved in the projects, and easily negotiate your salary increase

  • Continuously improve your skills, by seeing how your skills grow month over month.

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