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This is a rather unusual question for this site, but it seems UX enough for me.

I have read this article, Things I (honestly) don’t want to see in your portfolio, and the one point that struck me the most was "skill charts":

image of skills for software measured in stars

I always had the impression these were helpful to the HR person / recruiter, as an easy & quick way to get a grasp of the applicants skills. But in the comments section of this article a lot of people seemed to agree especially with this message.

Which way of visualization is more fit?

I now started thinking if a simple [word + years] format would be better. Something like:

enter image description here
(just imagine those are software icons)

I'm eager to hear what other ideas people have for this.

Just to make it clear, I'm not asking about the opinion of the article's author or why he thinks like that. I'm asking about the usefulness/helpfulness of the skill-visualization for the recruiter.

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    For a recruiter, maybe to mark a box that a candidate apparently has a skill. As a person who actually selects resumes to interview, and then hire, a candidate - I either ignore any portfolio that uses them, or I challenge the candidate to tell me what usibility principal they're applying when using such a system.
    – Nicholas Pappas
    Aug 21, 2018 at 0:30

2 Answers 2

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I think skills matrixes are way to subjective, you may consider yourself a master at a software tool in your current surrounding but you may not be else where.

Personally I never put them on for 2 reasons: 1. I never look for them them when hiring designers. 2. Id expect any hires I make to be familiar with these tools (depending on their level of experience and seniority of course). It is something I would ask in the interview to clarify.

I generally state a list of tools that I used for each project. As this shows I have experience and learnt it enough to use it on a project.

These tools are constantly changing and constantly shifting from one to another in terms of popularity.

So I would avoid them. Generally now when hiring designers it is expected that you would have some familiarity with software, if not, its not difficult to learn it or for the interviewer to simply ask if they really want to know.

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I believe this kind of representation is wrong because it is totally subjective (you give a mark to yourself). Moreover these tools are constantly evolving.

If you want to show that you can use it in a portfolio I guess that you could say which tool you used for each visual/project.

If you want to show it in a CV, I'd suggest you put in a "Tool" section, and just quote the tool names.

PS : In the case where you apply for a UX job I believe if you can use one of these 3 tools you can learn the 2 others very quickly.

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