STEP 1: WHAT Are Tech Research Jobs ALL ABOUT?
Market research survey
AKA: Market Research, UX Research
Overview: Understanding users from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective.
Example project: Design a survey to understand what content Apple TV users prefer.
What you do all day: Plan studies, conduct research (both digitally and in-person), analyze results, make recommendations
Roles: UX Research (analyzing how customers use products), Market Research (analyzing how customers think and buy)
What they look for: People with psychology, design, or statistics backgrounds
Example job: UX Researcher, Pinterest
STEP 2: WOULD YOU BE A GOOD FIT FOR Tech Research?
Ask yourself if you'd love doing these kinds of things all day:
Designing research studies
Conducting quantitative analysis on survey and market data
Managing qualitative research - interviews, user testing, focus groups
Converting data into actionable insights
Presenting findings to business partners
If your answer is "Yes" to the majority of activities, you'd likely be a good fit for Research jobs.
STEP 3: WHAT SKILLS DO YOU NEED FOR Research Jobs?
For each major activity, I've listed the most common keywords from across dozens of job descriptions, as well as a sample resume bullet:
· Designing research studies
o Keywords: methodologies, research methods, collaborate with business partners, understand business needs, applied research
o Sample Bullet: Designed a research study to explore student attitudes towards email, leading to a new product that reached 2M students in its first year
· Conducting quantitative analysis on survey and market data
o Keywords: quantitative research methods, analysis, visualizations, R, SQL, Python, data mining, data sources, sampling, experiments, structured and unstructured data, surveys
o Sample Bullet: Conducted a survey of our Facebook fans; used SQL and R to analyze the results, generating three new marketing ideas for that channel
· Managing qualitative research - interviews, user testing, focus groups
o Keywords: user experience research, qualitative research, field interviews, usability studies
o Sample Bullet: Led usability studies for our website, identifying font size as a major culprit for the site's high bounce rate
· Converting data into actionable insights
o Keywords: insights that inform product and business decisions, package insights
o Sample Bullet: Identified trends across qualitative and quantitative research that pointed to a coming downturn in app engagement; worked with product team to implement changes that prevented this dropoff
· Presenting findings to business partners
o Keywords: synthesize and communicate research findings to any audience, business partners, executives
o Sample Bullet: Presented UX findings to senior leadership, earning endorsement for wholesale changes to our flagship product's interface
STEP 4: WHAT Research TRAINING DO YOU RECOMMEND?
If you want to brush up on UX research skills, check out Matthew Nuzum’s Fast-Start Usability Testing and UX Research course on Udemy. It walks you through exactly how to run a user test and interpret the results, while avoiding the biases that interfere with developing great insights.
And if you want to go deeper on market research techniques, then try Asen Gyczew’s How to Conduct Market Research in Startups. It’s got great deep-dives into online and offline research methods, as well as three case studies that bring these techniques to life.
Disclosure: I’m an affiliate for some of the 3rd party courses listed on the site, which means I may earn a small fee if you choose to enroll (which I use to keep Break into Tech running).
STEP 5: HOW DO YOU ACTUALLY GET A Tech Research JOB?
To help you convert your passion and skills into an actual job, I've put together a step-by-step course that covers how to:
Design a resume that will mark you as an insider to tech recruiters
Make sure you find every single great tech job across multiple sites
Get a referral at just about any tech company - even if you don't know anyone directly
Prepare for every kind of tech interview question with point-by-point formulas