My response to a question on Quora – I decided to share it here…
A good question. I’m lucky, in that I’ve done a LOT of different things – and I think that variety of experiences has helped me become better at… well, user experience.
It all started in a 5,000-watt radio station in Birmingham, Alabama. With just a $50-a-week paycheck and a dream… No, seriously, Ted Baxter references aside, one of my first real jobs was in radio. I did college radio and, for a while, overnights for the local rock station. Doing a job like that taught me the importance of organization and multitasking, and, most importantly… communication. If you didn’t fill that dead air, it was exactly that… dead air. A lot of my communications skills can be attributed to me being behind a “hot mike” and trying to both communicate and entertain.
I also had a passion for design, and at the time the notion of the domain that eventually became known as “user experience” didn’t exist, so I learned graphic design and worked doing magazine layouts and advertisements for sporting periodicals such as Bowhunter and Deerhunter Magazine. It wasn’t glamorous, but I learned how to flow text around images and present things in a creative way.
For a while I managed a record store for a Kentucky-based chain, and that helped me get a sense of the practical realities of a segment of the business world that allowed me to communicate to business people with a better understanding of where they were coming from.
I then learned about this crazy new thing called “The Internet” and taught myself how to code HTML and make web pages, a skill that came in handy when I started working for a web service company that was a huge opportunity for me to learn about EVERYTHING: database design, server configuration, uptime, DNS tables, web security, e-commerce… the works.
You may notice that I have not yet described what my formal education was… and there’s a reason for that. I learned more by working and doing than I ever did in college, though I attribute what I learned when I was majoring in Journalism with a lot of my skills in usability testing, listening, writing, and being able to be objective.
So when UX finally became a domain of note, I was ready… it was the perfect fit for what I had learned and done – it was about something I was always good at – designing solutions for users, and solving problems.