From hospital pharmacist to UX researcher

Where she was

Priya had been a hospital pharmacist for eleven years. She was good at it, and she was the person colleagues went to when the new dispensing software made no sense. By her mid-thirties she was spending more time fixing how the system worked for people than doing the job she was trained for, and enjoying that part far more.

She’d looked at UX research twice before and talked herself out of it both times. No portfolio, no design degree, and a salary she didn’t want to drop.

The call

She booked a free call on a Sunday night after a twelve-hour shift. Her first sentence was, “I think I’m too late for this.” By the end of the half hour we’d agreed she wasn’t, and that the real question was whether she could explain her experience to a hiring manager who’d never set foot in a pharmacy.

What we worked on

In the first two sessions we listed every time she’d interviewed a patient, run a trial of a new process, or written up what went wrong after an error. It was a long list. Most of it was research; she’d just been calling it something else.

From there the work was practical: two case studies built from her pharmacy projects, a résumé rewritten around research methods instead of job titles, and twelve short conversations with researchers at health-tech companies. She went into each one with three questions and came out with a name to contact next. Three of those conversations turned into interviews.

The move

She started as a UX researcher at a 90-person health-tech company in June, working on the tools nurses use to log medication. The hiring manager told her later that her pharmacy background was the reason she got the interview, not something she had to explain away.

What was harder than expected

The take-home exercise for her second interview. She’d never presented work to a design team, and it showed: too many slides and not enough of her own opinion. We rehearsed it twice before the third one. She also took a small pay cut, about eight percent, which she’d decided in advance she could live with. She says it was worth it by her second month.