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George from San Francisco, California, asks, is a career in UX right for me?

I love that question. Thanks for asking, George. This is UX Question number 15 and I am Ben Judy.

Is a career in UX right for me? Well, choosing to commit to a career field is tough. You’re trying to look down the corridor of time and determine if you want to do the same kind of work for decades.

No exact formula exists for making this decision, but I’ll tell you how I arrived at my career decision—and I’ll give you some factors to consider.

I did not start my career path in UX. When I went to college at age 18, I went for a bachelor’s degree in broadcasting. I was certain I wanted to pursue a career in radio, TV, and film production. But a funny thing happened along the way.

See, I had also been interested in the World Wide Web and I taught myself HTML and I started building websites when I was in high school. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could have a career doing this, but I got a job making websites for a software company even while I was a sophomore in college.

That led to a realization that it might actually be easier to get a job doing web design than to get a job in media production. And that led me to a job at [Travelocity.com](http://Travelocity.com) where I encountered a multi-disciplinary UX team, and I knew I wanted to do this UX thing.

So ask yourself, are you already doing some aspect of UX work, or something UX-adjacent, and enjoying it? Even as a hobby? All it took for me was a slight pivot from my hobby in web design into a career in UX design. Are you doing some kind of research that involves studying how people behave? Do you like to design things?

Do you kinda like digital technology, but you’re even more interested in making the human experience better? Are you frustrated by bad user experiences and you want to do something about it? Sometimes great careers begin from a divine discontent, a place of frustration that the world is not as it should be.

Do you like solving problems for people that involve human-computer interaction, driven by human empathy? If so, UX design might be for you.

If you like to make money, go into business. If you like solving problems but you want to take people out of the equation, go into technology. If the intersection of business and systems and tech and people is where you want to work, pursue UX. And if you just like to shout nonsense into the void, start a YouTube channel or a podcast.

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