A few years out means you’ll need to brush up on your conceptual vocabulary and skills. Your understanding right now is likely pretty shallow from lack of practice.

Pull out your old school projects. What would you do differently today, away from the artificial constraints of school? If you don’t know, go back to the very basics. Re-read the foundational texts, make sure you know the vocabulary.

Pick targeted skills to improve:

• conduct discovery user research and make a list of requirements without designing. Write a report summarizing what you found.

• learn a new prototyping tool like Figma to recreate a interface that you think works well so you can solely concentrate on technical aspects.

• work on your visual design skills apart from digital interfaces (value/form, color, typography).

• Do heuristic evaluations of existing interfaces in the same problem space to see how they solve the problem similarly (or differently). Understand why they are different. Understand why they are the same.

• do a beginning front-end web tutorial, write a little code. You may never code again, but you’ll be working with software developers for the rest of your career. Learn their language, too.

When you feel comfortable with each phase, put it together in a small real-world project. Pick a user group that is nothing like yourself (the biggest mistake I see in portfolios is they only make things the designer would use, which usually leads to big blind spots in terms of actual user needs).

Give yourself time to learn and don’t expect a company to train you. They want people who can take guidance, ask the right questions and train themselves. Above all, companies need practitioners who have good soft skills. If you can’t work well with people with different backgrounds and priorities, you’ll have a hard time and be frustrated.