Hey and welcome back to a new year with Open Doors! 🍾 

2026 is here and will mark Open Doors third Birthday (crazy!). I hope you all had time to recharge and are ready to hit the ground running!

Expect more exclusive and tangible advice from me this year and hopefully also more high quality roles and a few platform upgrades to the job board but I will talk about that in time.

Aside from that keep an eye out for the workshops I basically run on a monthly basis now. Many of them are super relevant for early career folks and as Open Doors readers you usually get a good percentage off. I’m starting the year with a workshop on how to design for AI on January 28. Find more information further down below!

In this issue:

• The Classic Chicken & Egg Problem of Experience solved: You can’t get a job because you lack real-world experience but you can’t get real-world without a job? That’s where the misconception is. I’ll show you other ways of gaining real-world experience.

• An Insane Learning Resource: Some of the best people have teamed up to create a course bundle that will leave you with absolutely everything you need to level up as a designer.

• Rita’s Portfolio: Starting the year with a banger portfolio showing so much range.

🤝 TODAYS PARTNER

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The bundle is only available now until January 16th. $299 for everything.

How to Get Real-World Work Into Your Portfolio — No Matter Your Background 👷🏻‍♀️

There are study projects out there that are genuinely excellent. Every year I see a handful that are so well thought through, so well crafted, and so clearly articulated that they stand shoulder-to-shoulder with real product work. So let’s get one thing straight upfront: you don’t need real-world work to have a strong portfolio.

That said, real-world work does something fictional projects often struggle to do.

It grounds your work in reality.

It gives your decisions context.

And it allows you to talk about trade-offs, constraints, and impact in a way that’s immediately legible to recruiters and hiring managers.

Being able to say “this work shipped,” or “this was used,” or even “this was done for a real organization with real constraints” changes how your portfolio is read — especially early in your career.

That doesn’t mean real-world work automatically beats fictional work. Sloppy real-world work will always lose against thoughtful, well-executed study projects. But when quality is comparable, real-world context tends to unlock opportunities faster.

The obvious problem, of course, is the classic chicken-and-egg situation:

you need experience to get a job but you can only get experience with a job.

There’s no single clean solution to that. Some of it is timing. Some of it is luck. And some of it is finding the right setup that allows you to get your foot in the door without already being “qualified.”

What is useful, though, is knowing where real-world work actually comes from — and which paths are realistic for you, given where you are right now.

Internships: Great If You’re Eligible, One To Skip If You’re Not

Internships are the most obvious path into real-world work — and also the most limited.

Many large and mid-sized companies run structured internship programs, often with multiple design interns per cycle. These can be fantastic experiences and sometimes lead directly to return offers.

But they come with hard constraints.

In most countries, internships are limited to currently enrolled students or very recent graduates. That’s usually tied to labor law, tax structures, or internal hiring pipelines — not personal preference.

If you’re self-taught, came through a bootcamp, or graduated several years ago, these roles are often simply not available to you. And if an internship explicitly requires enrollment or a specific work visa, there’s no workaround — applying anyway just burns time and energy.

For those who are eligible, timing matters. Internship hiring often starts months in advance and follows academic calendars. Miss the window, and even strong candidates can get filtered out.

Internships are powerful — but only if you qualify. If you do, take them seriously. If you don’t, move on quickly and focus on paths that actually apply to you.

Volunteering: Real Experience, With Important Caveats

Volunteering sits in a more ambiguous space — ethically and practically — but when done right, it can be a genuinely valuable way to gain real-world experience.

Unlike internships, volunteering roles rarely require you to be enrolled. Non-profits, charities, and community organizations often need design help and have far fewer formal barriers to entry.

That accessibility is the upside. The downside is that not all volunteering roles are created equal.

A good volunteering setup is usually:

• limited or flexible in hours,

• clear about expectations,

• not asking you to spend money,

• and open about portfolio usage.

If an organization expects near full-time commitment for free, avoids answering questions about whether you can show the work, or treats the role like unpaid employment, that’s a red flag.

There are legitimate platforms that curate volunteering opportunities, especially in the non-profit space. A few worth looking into:

• Catchafire – skilled volunteering for nonprofits across design, product, and strategy

• Taproot Foundation – pro bono projects with established nonprofit organizations

• Idealist – a broad platform for nonprofit roles, including design and digital work

• Design for Good / local civic tech groups – often city-based and community-driven

• Techfleet – one of the best tech-focussed structured volunteering programs. Sadly getting in isn’t super easy

On the more structured side, programs like TechFleet offer cohort-based project work that simulates real product environments. These programs are popular and competitive, so waitlists are common — but the structure and credibility can make them worth it.

Volunteering won’t magically fix a weak portfolio. But it can give you real constraints, real collaboration, and real context — if you choose the setup carefully.

Self-Initiated Mini Case Studies (a.k.a. Unsolicited Work Done Right)

This is where things shift from permission-based to initiative-based.

Instead of waiting for a role to exist, you create something that could lead to one — or, at the very least, to stronger portfolio material.

The idea is simple: pick a real company or startup you genuinely like, spend a focused amount of time understanding their product, identify a concrete problem, and design a small, thoughtful improvement.

Most of these will never get a reply. That’s normal.

But here’s why this approach still works:

Even if no one responds, you’ve created work that’s grounded in a real product, real users, and real constraints. With some expansion, that work can become a legitimate case study — far more credible than a blank-slate fictional brief.

And if even one out of several pitches leads to a conversation, that’s already a better outcome than most early-career applications achieve right now.

The key is scope and intent. This isn’t about doing free labor or redesigning entire products. It’s about demonstrating how you think, what you notice, and how you prioritize — in a way that feels realistic and respectful.

I’ve written a much more detailed breakdown of this approach before, including how to scope it, how much time to spend, and how to present it properly.

→ Read my article on how to craft a mini case study based to pitch to startups 

If you’re interested in this path, I strongly recommend reading that before diving in.

Building Your Own Side Project

Starting your own project — alone or with others — is the most self-directed way to get real-world work into your portfolio.

And there’s never been a better time to do it.

With modern tooling and vibe-coding platforms, building functional products from your designs is more accessible than ever. You don’t need a full dev team, and you don’t need to turn it into a startup to make it meaningful.

That said, this approach only works if you’re intentional.

Throwing together a shallow app in an afternoon and writing a case study about it won’t help much. The value comes from depth: thinking through the problem, iterating, making decisions, and being able to explain why things are the way they are.

There are two directions that tend to work well here.

One is craft-driven: building something that’s visually tight, interaction-heavy, and clearly shows taste and restraint.

The other is impact-driven: building something genuinely useful — even if it’s just for yourself. If you can show that it changed how you work, saved time, or solved a real problem, that’s powerful context for a case study.

You don’t need to launch a company. You don’t need users in the thousands. You need clarity about what you built, why you built it, and what you learned along the way.

A Final Thought

Real-world work isn’t a requirement — but it is an accelerator.

It helps others understand how you operate when things aren’t clean, fictional, or perfectly scoped. It gives you language beyond aesthetics. And it often makes conversations with hiring teams more concrete and less hypothetical.

If you’re a student, internships might be your most direct path.

If you’re not, volunteering, self-initiated work, or side projects can get you surprisingly far.

What matters most isn’t which path you take — it’s that you choose one deliberately, understand its limitations, and use it to strengthen the story your portfolio is telling.

That’s what actually moves things forward.

🪢 UNTANGLE AI AND HOW TO DESIGN FOR IT WITH ME

Design better AI products — even if you’ve never worked on one before.

AI is making its way into more product experiences, but most designers haven’t been taught how to design for it. How do you build trust when outputs are probabilistic? What does “good UX” even mean when the system might be wrong?

​This workshop breaks it down.

​We’ll work through a practical, hands-on exercise where we critique and redesign an AI product experience together. Whether you’re preparing for your first AI project or want to build a strong case study for your portfolio, this is where to start.

As always Open Doors readers get 20% off the regular price with the code OPENDOORS26! Make sure to use it at checkout.

👀 Portfolio Showcase

Today: Rita Wang

Rita Wang’s portfolio is one of those that immediately signals something different. Not louder, not flashier for the sake of it — but more considered, more curious, and more intentional than what you’d typically expect from a student designer.

Currently a product design and communication design student at WashU, and interning at Ascension, Rita

presents a body of work that feels unusually broad for her career stage — yet never careless. While much of the work is fictional or self-initiated, it rarely feels academic. Instead, it reads as exploratory, thoughtful, and grounded in a genuine interest in how digital experiences can feel, behave, and resonate.

What’s particularly compelling is that this isn’t a portfolio built around one safe narrative. Rita is clearly experimenting — with mediums, with tools, with levels of abstraction — and doing so with enough skill that those experiments hold real weight. That comes with trade-offs, which we’ll get to. But first, it’s worth unpacking what makes this portfolio so strong in the first place.

That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

Do you want your own portfolio reviewed in-depth with a 30-minute advice-packed video review? Or do you require mentoring to figure out a proper strategy for your job search?

I got you!

• Book an in-depth portfolio or resume review with me

• Book a mentoring session with me

• Book a quick 15 min chat to ask a question and see if we vibe

Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian