Do User Experience (UX) Design Courses Meet Industry’s Needs? Analysing UX Degrees and Job Adverts

What I read

In this text, the authors juxtapose job postings from companies hiring UX designers, and academic programs in the UK that are offering UX degrees; they conclude that the two are not aligned.

First, the authors describe that, while UX is growing in higher education, it has a lack of an agreed upon definition of how it is practiced, and this means that educational programs that are focused on vocational education don’t have a firm foundation upon which to build their curriculum. Some existing studies have started to examine the nature of UX competencies as they show up in industry; Gray is cited extensively, and it is noted that “limited research considers how employers hiring UX designers… define UX design’s competencies.” The goals of this study are to identify those competencies in industry and academia, and see if they are aligned. The study compared job postings and posted curriculum from higher education institutions in the UK.

The authors then define UX, indicating that it is holistic in nature and is cross-disciplinary. They also briefly define competence and learning outcomes, as well as professionalization. These are then triangulated, as professionalization requires specialized knowledge and a formalized process of education and training, but this is lacking in UX education.

The authors describe the methods of their study. They selected UX related courses from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service website in the UK, and identified 93 programs and modules. These were narrowed to 32 courses, but the method to narrow the sample is not indicated. They also identified 50 job advertisements from online job aggregator boards. The authors analyzed the courses and advertisements. They focused on learning outcomes from the courses, and identified high level domains that were mentioned across courses; the teaching content was also analyzed at a more detailed level. They then compared the quantity of references to skills in course literature to the references in job postings, which indicated a mismatch.

The authors discuss and analyze their results. When looking at course competencies, they see a lack of alignment, which “underline the need for more research into UX practice and pedagogy to support the development of the field in academia.” They also note that courses focused on technical skills, which “reflected a broader issue that effective practice is – too often – framed in terms of technical concerns; knowing the right tool, method, or software.” The authors also find that course work and employer needs are not aligned. Employers “place a greater emphasis on practical tools and methods. Educators, however, place a greater emphasis on cognitive and interpersonal skills.” The authors describe that higher education needs to build a better understanding of the unique ways UX is practiced, and must “balance industry’s clamour for ‘plug and play employees’ with the reality that UX design is rapidly evolving in response to technological innovation and changing market expectations.”

What I learned and what I think

The findings of the study don’t surprise me. One finding is that academia is disconnected from industry needs generally, and that user experience courses are disconnected from industry needs for user experience professionals, specifically. Academia always lags because of the tedium of updating course content, and many educators aren’t practitioners, so their knowledge lags as well. Another finding is that industry is looking for tactical skills, and academia is looking to grow deep thinking and critical skills—again, a mismatch that is probably institutional. Educators want to do what is intellectually (and morally, given the cost of education) sound, and have a visceral reaction to teaching software. I certainly do (but for a different reason; I think you can learn software on your own by doing things).

I’m struggling with their conclusions, though. The language about industry is pretty demeaning (“clamouring”, “too often”), as if the realities of working are “less than” the goals of academia. If the authors are recognizing that design is embodied in how it’s practiced, I don’t understand how you can just write off the realities of that embodiment. And the larger conclusion seems to be that academia needs to spend more time, not less, on building a base set of knowledge around critical thinking and disciplinary specificity; objectively, I read from the data that they should be spending more time on teaching software and tactics (and therefore producing a richer body of knowledge and understanding around that). I don’t like that, but that’s how I read it.

I’m thinking about the shelf-life of research like this, too. I think researchers looking at practice are at a disadvantage, because practice is changing at a speed that is much, much faster than a publishing cycle. Even if study-to-publish takes nine months or a year, the profession will have made large pivots, probably driven by things like capacity needs and software changes. This was written in 2019 and published in 2021. Covid happened in-between, and the industry blew up in all sorts of ways. From 2021 to 2025, we went through the hiring crazy and firing crazy. The academy may now be educating “ux professionals” that will never find jobs at all. It almost seems like, if the tenure structure around publishing isn’t going to change, the cadence needs to adapt (if the research is actually intended to matter) to something like a “pre-publishing” on a social-media friendly venue like a blog, a publishing a year or two later, and then a retrospective (again, in a social venue) that updates the content based on how industry has changed.