This sound like you are hacking or doing tricky stuffs to get the job, but believe me it is not going to happen that way at the high competitive market today. This article will tell you other aspects that you should take into account when you prepare for the real professional work.

First, let’s have a look at dozens of job description out there. I grabbed here some of them

Now if we try to category them it will fall into 4 main groups that reflect the company needs (you could do it whenever you look at a JD)

1. Hard skills: Skills that you need to deliver your design
2. Soft skills: Skills that you need to work with others
3. Domain knowledge: Skills that you need to understand your product, context, and users
4. Company experience: Skills that you need to prove your practical experiences

If you look 4 main groups of needs, now your problem will turn from

How to apply for UX Job without experience?

to

How to apply for UX Job without Hard skills, Soft skills, Domain knowledge, Company experience?

Now, problems seem more challenge because It generated more new items. In fact, you could not get any jobs if all your skills are 0% completed like that. The thing you could do here is to evaluate your skills and knowledge base on this 4 categories. I will try to make it easy for you to imagine by this chart bellow. Let think about those skills grow up with you along your journey, the more your seniority are the more skills are enhanced, then your ideal growth chart will be like this

To be more clear, let take this guy for example:

Anna is completely new to the product design, but when we look her profile, there are many potential condition will make she becomes a future product designer, then you will see how her growth chart going. It is not from 0, she already had some hard skills from graphic design, she also gathered some soft skills from the time she was working at club & community.

Then this is your turn to think about your start, your background, your experiences and your growth chart. Once you define your chart, you know how did you start, and how you could invest for your future career. Here are my suggestion for your improvement

1. Hard skills: Try to watch, learn, listen, read as much as you can, leverage any chance to learn more from course, books, senior designer. There are a lot of resources right now so you can search for kind of learning works for you
2. Soft skills: Join the community, find your peers for motivation and mentor for guiding you. Try to facilitate workshop or small group of people because you will learn a lot of things from understand and communicate through the workshop. Learn to write and synthesize what you learn and see
3. Domain knowledge: Look for research, seminars, books about your product area you are working, try to diversify your projects in different industries. Meet user/experts in the industry to have a talk about problems that you are solving even it is just your university exercises.
4. Company Experience: Bid for freelance project, try different type of company, look for your internship and you can even think of opening your own business

Final though

Great product sell themselves — Kevin Systrom

If you consider yourself as a product then the more you invest, the more opportunities will come to you.