Someone who recently made my acquaintaince asked me to help provide some pointers for breaking into IA after having worked on visual design. I gave some very honest responses because I know that job hunting is hard. I asked that he realize that these are my opinions and don't necessarily reflect his personal situation. I can only speak to my experience. With his consent, I'm posting a bit of our conversation about applying and interviewing for IA jobs here. These ideas apply mainly to people who are sending a resumé out blindly. That is to say, without a word of mouth recommendation.

I want everyone I meet who wants to become an IA to find it easy to get the jobs they want, but it's hard to know how to help make that happen. Maybe recording this conversation will help someone a little bit.

*I am casting about for a mentor figure in this process*

You may be interested in AIfIA's future mentoring program.

*Is this a slow time for hiring in the field?*

I've heard that things started picking up a bit here in NYC area. For the in-house positions, my suspicion is that corporations are looking for people who have already worked for 5+ years in information architecture or interaction design jobs at agencies and consultancies because there are often only 1 or 2 positions they're looking to fill and they are senior level, e.g. Director of IA or ID. There seems to be less risk taking within corporations, but as the IAs and IDs establish themselves there, they are likely to hire others.

*Am I under/mis-qualified for this kind of work, and thus not piquing any interest? How do I get the interview?*

It's hard for me to say not knowing what the employers you've applied with are looking for, what you've presented them in interviews, etc. But probably what interviewers will judge you by is a combination of word of mouth recommmendation, experience (with whom and on what types of projects) and the proof in the portfolio.

Perhaps it will help to know how I approach job targetting. I've used this strategy for everything from internships to full time positions. When I apply for jobs I don't mass mail. I tailor everything. I research fully what the organization is about, what their job description reads and how that matches what they say about the company and what type of work they do, who they serve. I write a cover letter that identifies what they do, what they're looking for and where I can help help them with business goals. I actually tailor my resume to match their job description where possible, being absolutely truthful. I play down the things that won't matter to them and play up the things that do. Each time I've looked for jobs I've targetted where I wanted to work and only sent a few resumes out. But times were better then. With the poor economy, job searching now may be different, but my strategy of tailoring my sales pitch to each hiring opportunity is probably more important now than before. Unfortunately you have to think of this as a sale. What do you bring to the table, and how would the prospective employer benefit from having you?

Most importantly, if you are looking to get street cred as an IA, you might want to understand what the high-level thinkers believe about IA and information work. Demonstrate your ability to understand, communicate, and implement those ideas within a team. Are you very familiar with the profession's idea of what an information architect should know and can you demonstrate that you can do those things on the job? Make your job descriptions mention the sort of things you do that relate to IA. Mention the high-level ideas, but do talk enough about the nitty gritty (e.g. deliverables) as well.

If you are looking for a job doing little IA (requirements, content organization, user research, wireframing, etc.) you want to talk about this and demonstrate it in your portfolio. IAs care about these. When it comes to hiring someone to do much of the nitty gritty IA work -- the documents and deliverables, the outcome of your intellectual work -- they will want to see you demonstrate that you know what you're doing. Have you done a lot of user research and persona development? Show us your persona deliverables and come prepared with notes about your process. Do you do a lot of content work or work on taxonomies? Describe your processes and outcomes. Do you have to do wireframes? Show it in your portfolio. All of these are elements of the typical IA and ID processes and if you do it, you have to mention it in your resume. It might help to look at how other people craft their portfolios.

Take a good look at the DeliverablesAndArtifacts page on the IaWiki, and especially look at the IAPortfoliosAndCompanyExamples section to see what people put in their portfolios. These are good sales pitches. People put *a lot* of time into showing these in the portfolios. The documents should sell themselves.

If you are looking for a job doing big IA -- project management or enterprise level stuff -- you have to demonstrate that you understand these types of issues. One of the best ways to do that are to read a lot, get experience on these types of projects if you're presently employed, and then participate in a community, e.g. AIfIA members list, SIGIA, SIGCHI CHI Web. Blogging also helps. I started to get heavily headhunted after blogging iaslash.org for two years, because I talked about my ideas related to information work.

If you have "Objective" and "Skills" sections in your resumé, I would move the skills somewhere near the bottom of the page and consider getting rid of the Objective section of your resume. Employers are interested in what they seek and what you bring to the table much more than what you want. It's your job to demonstrate to and convince them that you're a good match. If you want to tell them about what you seek, put it in the cover letter.

*With HR people I get "sorry, not a good fit with us" outright rejections.*

HR people aren't usually the most knowledgeable about the jobs they seek to fill, and unfortunately you may never know the truth about why you "didn't fit". Getting past HR is probably a matter of having the right stuff in your resume, whether it's the right previous jobs or the right work in your portfolio. Some recruiting firms and HR have been known to scan, OCR and search through resumeés electronically. At least, this is what I've read. Because of this, it's exteremely important to take care when selecting the words you use in your resumé. This makes the layout of a resume particularly difficult because you might want to use terse bullet points to make your resume readable, but if you also want to be a bit descriptive if you're sending a resume out blindly. As I've mentioned above, be selectively descriptive. Throw out the 1 page rule and talk about what you do, mentioning the terms you think an HR person might keyword search on.

*Can you articulate what path you took as you moved from design to IA (etc.)?*

I was never a visual designer. I've always been more of an information worker. My approach was this. I got interested in information work related to art images and got an Master of Library Science. I went after two internships while in graduate school. I did an intership at an interactive design agency that did CD ROMs, and took an internship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art research library (mainly doing electronic reference). I then applied for the Met Museum's graduate internship program and was one of the winners of that stipended award. At the Met, I was asked to help with an art web site bibliography. I ended up taking on more and designing the indexing process and developing a tool to produce an intranet site for their new electronic resources center.

I should mention that I also got marginally interested in creative aspects of web design before graduate school and have maintained a personal home page since 1994 (Mosaic days) and have been designing my home page ever since then. It is perhaps one the most important aspects of my professional development. It's my testing ground for both intellectual and technical implementation ideas.

Then I learned everything on the job, read voraciously and started blogging about everything I read. People only know me outside of my job because what I've published in print and on iaslash. But my experience becoming an IA was basically to get a job doing information work related to the web, and then read and learn on the job and take notes on a blog as I learned. Then I kept modifying my processes and deliverables to reflect what I liked best in what I read. This is still what I do to improve professionally.

*What ideal path can you recommend (or is that a goofy abstract question...Maybe things just "fall together", or don't...Maybe a transition of this kind can't be engineered?*

I can't really recommend a path. IAs come from everywhere, but it's noteworthy that equally large numbers come from both visual design and library and information science.

*Should I specialize more, apply to only one subset of the interface/usability/IA realm? I'm currently applying to most jobs with these titles: Senior Visual Designer, User Experience Designer, User Interface Designer, User Interface Architect, Information Architect, Senior Web Designer...Some could be a stretch for me, but like growing into a new pair of shoes, I hope I could grow into a role that may at first be a little big for me.*

It's hard to know what titles mean. I certainly think there is a difference between IA and usability. Usability I associate with 1) an idea and 2) a discrete role that does usability testing. Two very different things. I don't do # 2. All of those job titles seems appropriate probably. Visual Designer is almost always about graphic design primarily and less about what IAs do (the content aspect). User Experience Designer is probably a high level position that also encompasses a good deal of interaction design. UI Designer, UI Architect can be IA and ID. Senior Web Designer is vague. Foremost, you should have a good idea what you want to do on the job. And as I said, tailor your resume to reflect the job. You will know most times after an interview if the job is a match.

*What professional certifications did you have as you moved into IA, or was it all evident in your portfolio of projects?*

You don't necesarily need any specific degrees or certifications to do IA. I have an MLS. I have seen jobs requiring an HCI or Library and Information Science background. But many IAs I know simply have liberal arts degrees and "happened into" IA during the .com heyday.

As I've tried to explain above, the proof is often in things like the portfolio, in the recommendations people give of your work. I hope some of the observations above have been helpful.