Is there a misalignment in skills in the UX profession? Specifically, when UX managers are hiring, is there a misalignment in what applicants and current practitioners report doing and the skills managers need?
In a previous article, we did a deep dive into what UX practitioners reported doing in the 2024 UXPA salary survey, tracking UX methods usage from 2014 through 2024.
But to what extent do the activities reported by UX practitioners in 2024 match what UX hiring managers looked for in 2025?
The 2024 UXPA Salary Survey
Roughly every two years, MeasuringU assists the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) in conducting a salary survey to glean insights from the UX community and track historical patterns in salaries and other aspects of UX work.
For the 2024 survey, data were collected from April through October 2024, receiving 444 responses from 37 countries, with 67% of responses from the U.S., 4% from Canada, and 4% from the UK. In addition to the main topic of salary, the 2024 survey included attitudes about certification, previous and expected use of AI, and planned hiring in 2025. While the data are about a year old now, it still provides a good contemporary snapshot of the industry and will likely remain applicable into 2026.
UX Managers’ Hiring Goals for 2025
For the 71 respondents who planned to hire in 2025, two of the questions they answered concerned the number of planned hires and their desired skills.
Number of Planned Hires in 2025
As shown in Figure 1, of managers who intended to make hires, 72% planned to make one or two UX hires, 83% planned to make one to three hires, and 94% planned to make up to five hires. Only 5% planned to make more than eight new hires.
Figure 1: Number of planned UX hires in 2025.
Comparing What UX Hiring Managers Want with What UX Practitioners Report Doing
Table 1 shows a side-by-side comparison of the skills UX hiring managers wanted to hire in 2025 and the skills that UX practitioners reported using in 2024.
| Method | What Managers Want | What Practitioners Do | Absolute Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| User research/interviews/surveys | 77% | 75% | 2% |
| Usability testing | 75% | 69% | 6% |
| Personas/user profiles | 59% | 59% | 0% |
| Heuristic expert review | 51% | 50% | 1% |
| Information architecture | 49% | 42% | 7% |
| Surveys | 49% | 59% | 10% |
| Online research | 48% | 34% | 14% |
| Benchmarking competitive studies | 48% | 44% | 4% |
| Interface interaction design | 44% | 36% | 8% |
| Card sorting | 44% | 45% | 1% |
| Task analysis | 42% | 32% | 10% |
| Creating high fidelity prototypes | 42% | 33% | 9% |
| UX design workshops | 41% | 43% | 2% |
| Creating low fidelity prototypes | 38% | 37% | 1% |
| Requirements gathering | 37% | 37% | 0% |
| Visual graphic design | 35% | 21% | 14% |
| Contextual inquiry/ethnography | 34% | 34% | 0% |
| Focus groups | 30% | 27% | 3% |
| Conceptual design | 30% | 38% | 8% |
| Satisfaction surveys | 30% | 39% | 9% |
| Strategic consulting | 28% | 30% | 2% |
| Ethnography | 25% | 20% | 5% |
| Analyze web metrics | 25% | 31% | 6% |
| Market research | 21% | 27% | 6% |
| Training in UX | 20% | 29% | 9% |
| Accessibility testing | 18% | 21% | 3% |
| Accessibility expert reviews | 17% | 13% | 4% |
| Content strategy | 11% | 16% | 5% |
| Web development | 10% | 9% | 1% |
| Technical writing | 8% | 10% | 2% |
| Content creation | 8% | 17% | 9% |
| Eye tracking | 6% | 7% | 1% |
Table 1: Skills UX managers wanted to hire in 2025 and what UX practitioners reported doing in 2024 (heat map in the Absolute Differences column goes from green for small differences to red for large differences).
Table 1 shows strong correspondence between the skills UX managers wanted in 2025 and the skills UX practitioners reported using in 2024.
In all but two cases, the difference between manager and practitioner percentages was 10% or less. The exception was Online Research (48% managers, 34% practitioners, difference of 14%) and Visual Graphic Design (35% managers, 21% practitioners, difference of 14%). Of these two, only Online Research was in the top ten wanted skills for managers.
The term “online research” can mean two things to UX practitioners. One is conducting primary research (e.g., running your own unmoderated usability study) with a tool like the MUiQ® platform. The other is conducting secondary research (critically examining the published research of others to see what they have already discovered) using web services like Google Scholar or AI services like Deep Research. Jakob Nielsen recently described secondary research as “one of the most underutilized weapons in the UX arsenal,” so it is encouraging to see online research in the top ten skills sought by hiring UX managers.
Another way to visualize the relationship between the skills UX managers want to hire and what UX practitioners report doing is with a scatterplot (Figure 2). A regression line through the points in the scatterplot shows 87% shared variance between the percentages for managers and practitioners (a highly significant correlation, r(30) = .93, p < .0001). The equation for the regression line has a slope of .86 and an intercept of .04, which is nearly a perfect regression (which would have a slope of 1 and an intercept of 0).
Figure 2: Scatterplot of skills UX managers wanted to hire in 2025 and those UX practitioners reported using in 2024.
We added five callouts to Figure 2, one for the method least frequently chosen by managers and practitioners (eye tracking), two for the methods most frequently chosen by managers and practitioners (user research and usability testing), and two for the methods with the greatest differences between manager and practitioner selection frequencies (visual graphic design and online research).
Summary and Discussion
Of the 444 respondents in the 2024 UXPA Salary Survey, 71 were UX managers who intended to add staff in 2025. Key findings related to the plans and expectations of these managers were:
Strong expectations of at least one or two new hires: 72% of these UX managers planned for one or two new hires. Only 5% planned to make eight or more new hires, and 22% planned to increase their staff by three to five new hires.
Strong alignment of skills: The three top skills (user research, usability testing, personas/user profiles) were in the same order for managers’ selections of desired skills and the skills practitioners reported doing. Across all skills tracked in the UXPA survey, the correlation of selection percentages by managers and practitioners was very high (r(30) = .93, p < .0001).
Notable gap in online research: While alignment was strong overall, managers more frequently emphasized online research (48%) than practitioners reported doing (34%). This suggests a potential growth area, particularly in secondary research methods.
Bottom line: From a broad perspective, there was little daylight between the skills UX managers wanted to hire in 2025 and the skills of practitioners working in 2024. Of all the challenges UX applicants and employers face, most of the time, they shouldn’t need to worry about skills mismatch.
