UX Design Training for Veterans

Are you a veteran returning to civilian life or a member of a veteran’s family aiming to avail yourself of entitlements and benefits? This article is designed to help you navigate your options for taking advantage of these services to enter into a professional skills training program and learn the UX design skills you’ve always wanted to learn. Learning UX design skills as a veteran can give you a competitive edge in the job market and allow you to transition into a career that matches your skillset. This is because UX design involves understanding how people use products, services, and devices so that they can be designed to be user-friendly and meet user needs and expectations.

What is UX Design?

User experience design (UX design) is a field of web design dealing with how a website, application, or other digital product feels to its users. User experience design ensures that an application feels easy and accessible to operate. It is a heavily invested field in user behavior research, prototype testing, and data analysis. It is useful to think of it as the more hands-on counterpart to its visually-oriented sister skill, user interface design. User experience design isn’t isolated to work on a single webpage or digital application and instead refers to a subset of data science that strictly examines user preference and behavior regarding web applications.

Read more about what UX design is and why you should learn it. 

What Can You Do with UX Design Skills?

UX design skills will allow you to build better digital applications and contribute to a larger pool of knowledge that helps other designers build better web applications. Whether one is working on individual projects or attempting to improve digital design as a whole, user experience training will help professionals build digital applications that are more user-friendly, accessible, and memorable than ever before. UX design is a particularly enticing field for anyone who feels that digital applications need to be doing more to respond to the needs of their users, as this is the field that gathers the data that demonstrates these needs.

Support for Veterans

Veterans have several support options available when transitioning into civilian life and beginning their journey of learning UX design. The most prominent is the GI Bill, the Forever GI Bill, and the VET TEC program, as these are specifically tailored to support veterans and their families in pursuit of a career in UX design. 

Veterans can access the GI Bill to get tuition assistance, housing allowance, book stipend, and relocation payment for schooling at public or private universities. Additionally, VET TEC is a beneficial program that offers similar benefits but does not consume any resources from the GI Bill. This provides veterans an alternative option while still being able to apply for funding under the GI Bill later if desired. It's necessary to remember that Noble Desktop’s programs are ineligible for financing through VET TEC.

If you are a veteran in search of VA-supported programs, Noble Desktop is here to assist. The Veterans Support page contains all the pertinent information about our courses available for veterans only at an onsite location and within New York City. With full-time class schedules specially tailored to accommodate your needs, we guarantee that you will get extensive training in UX design and relevant tools.

Why Learn UX Design

Learning UX design allows veterans to transition into the tech industry with an established set of skills and techniques to create user-friendly websites, mobile applications, and software. Understanding UX design will give veterans a competitive edge in the job market and allow them to transition into a career that matches their skillset. This is because UX design involves understanding how people use digital applications and finding ways to make them more efficient, user-friendly, and accessible. 

For veterans looking for a creative outlet, UX design can be a great way to express their creativity while creating something tangible that makes a difference in people’s lives. UX design combines the best of both worlds, art and science, to create digital applications that are both visually appealing and user-friendly. 

If you’re a veteran looking for an exciting career in tech, UX design is the perfect way to combine your skills as a veteran with your interest in technology. With the right training program, veterans can easily transition into UX design and find their place in the tech industry.

Why Choose a Skills Bootcamp?

Skills bootcamps and career-certificate programs are shorter than a four-year college degree, so you can get certified more quickly. You learn skills that can help you get a job right away, but they don't give you the same training length as a university program. However, the skills you learn at a bootcamp can be just as beneficial when looking for a job. Bootcamps often give you access to career coaches and mentors who can help you with your job search after graduation. 

The choice is clear when you look at the costs of a traditional college degree versus a skills bootcamp. Bootcamps offer more focused instruction and less time commitment for those who want to get started in UX design quickly. Plus, you can build your portfolio as you learn, so when it comes time to look for a job, you have real-world experience to prove what you know. This gives you an edge over other applicants.

Learn UX Design at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop offers students many user experience design courses and bootcamps. These courses, available both in-person and online, offer in-depth, career-focused UX design training and are all taught by expert instructors in real time. Even taken online, these courses allow students to interact directly with their instructor in the classroom and during one-on-one mentoring sessions. The small class sizes ensure students won’t get lost in crowded lecture halls. In addition, students can retake any course they enroll in for free within one year. This means students can take their courses a second time to review lessons, cover material they found difficult, or get more hands-on user experience design practice.

For students looking to learn the basics of UX design, Noble offers a UX Design in a Day, in which students will learn the basic elements of the UX design process. They will learn key terms and ideas, like personas and scenarios, and how to conduct basic user research and interview participants to receive feedback. They will also learn the basic process of sketching and building prototype applications for testing. This is an introductory course, so it will only scratch the surface of the tests and research work involved in UX design, but it is an important course for laying the foundation for more immersive training.

Students seeking a more detailed, career-focused training course can enroll in Noble’s UX & UI Design Certificate. This course prepares students for employment in the UX/UI design field and will provide students with hands-on experience building and testing user interfaces. Users will receive training in advanced research techniques, including conducting interviews, producing written user reports, and running surveys. Then, students will learn how to interpret this data so that they may return to their designs and iterate on them in light of the feedback. Students will also be given hands-on training in prototyping and design software like Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. At the end of the course, students can build a portfolio of sample interface designs and user experience case studies they can use to enter the workforce in the field of user experience design.

Key Insights

• UX design is a growing field, providing exciting opportunities for veterans to leverage their skills and expertise. 
• Veterans can take advantage of the VET TEC program to receive funding for UX design training. 
• Skills bootcamps offer shorter, more focused instruction and help veterans create a competitive edge in the job market. 
• Noble Desktop offers comprehensive UX design training in-person and online.