I became a UX designer through an atypical career path. From being an auditor to IT manager to front-end developer, I picked up skills that enabled me to succeed as a UX designer.
As an internal systems auditor, I learned user research and process analysis. An auditor needs to interview the audited and gain an understanding of their business and their processes to make assessments of risks and exposures.
While as an auditor, the creative side in me led me to take evening architectural design classes. These classes taught me the iterative process of research, ideation, prototyping and validation. More importantly, I learned to embrace feedback, both positive and negative!
In my next job as an IT manager, I learned user empathy. IT is a service organization and managing user satisfaction and user expectations is key to its success. The goal was to hide the technology from the end user while enabling them. Our motto, "If the user didn't know who we were, we were doing our jobs!"
Being a front-end developer, broadened my scope of possible solutions for a given problem. Not all problems are best solved by technology. And similarly, not all problems are best solved by design. Having an appreciation for both design and development, helps me to find the best solutions to enable a project’s success.