My school (MSU) has the #1 SCM program in the country which is what initially attracted me to the major. From what I’ve heard, it is in high demand and there is a great starting salary. I’m a freshman and will be applying to the college of business next semester in order to be able to pursue this degree, but the problem is that they changed the admissions policy this year which made it very competitive. My advisor told me that the average GPA to get accepted to Broad is 3.5 and only about 50-60% of applicants get in. I’m a pretty good student but I’ll be competing with tons of really intelligent/driven people which is very intimidating.
Since I’ve been worrying so much about not getting accepted, I did some research for backup majors/careers that could be a good fit for me. I just learned what User Experience Design is and I am intrigued but it’s difficult to find info on it online since it’s a relatively new field. I want to know how competitive it is to get good jobs in this field and what the average entry salary is.
Hi, I’m in the UX field. UX designers are in pretty high demand across the tech industry, but the jobs are competitive. It seems that many people in the field find their jobs by knowing someone - I’m a UX researcher; I just started a new job 3 months ago at a big tech company, and I’m the only one who wasn’t recruited from somewhere. Also, most of the UX design jobs seem to want people with experience: most of the ads I’ve seen want people who have 3-5 years experience with wireframing, A/B testing, certain tools, etc. So I get the sense that it’s one of those careers where it’s kind of difficult to break into, but once you’re there there’s so much opportunity to move around different companies. It does look like most UX design jobs will hire you with a BA, though. (in UX research they mostly want a graduate degree.)
Salary varies depending on company and what part of the country you’re in. I’d say the average is probably around $75-90K. At big companies in the tech hubs of SF and Seattle, you can easily make six figures to start (but then mostly they hire UX designers with experience elsewhere). At smaller companies in smaller cities, you’ll make less, maybe around $65-80K. It really depends. As a brand new, entry-level UX designer I’d expect to make around $50K maybe. It’s hard to tell, because again, so many of the jobs are for experienced professionals.
One thing is that because UX design is such a new field, the requirements and expectations for what they do vary widely from company to company. Some companies just want their UX designers to to design and that’s it, and they have in-house UX researchers/testers who test. Some companies expect UX designers to have experience doing the research part, too, and their UXDs are essentially researchers as well. Most companies want UX designers to have some programming experience but some don’t care.
SCM and UX are so different that what will matter is not which has the best job prospects over the next few years- both are good bets- but rather which suits you better. Which one you are likely to be good at?
UX design requires you to be technical enough to work with the developers who write the code, and intuitive enough to understand how users will react to (and interact with) a screen.
SCM has a range of ways to go- it can be more technical or relational, more operational or strategic.