180: UX Hiring Insights: Eric Shumake on Healthcare UX, Specializing, & Thinking of Your Career as Gigs​​

Most UX professionals spend years trying to be good at everything. Eric Shumake, founder of HXR Labs, spent 20 years getting really good at one thing and it kept opening doors he didn't expect.

Eric is a principal UX researcher and a well-known voice in healthcare UX. His career has taken him through companies like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Myriad Genetics, and AliveCor.

He also teaches, including a popular course on Maven on breaking into healthcare UX, and has been exploring how AI can meaningfully (and responsibly) augment research without replacing the judgment that makes research trustworthy.

In this episode, Eric and Sarah cover a lot of ground: how specializing almost always beats generalizing, what surprises people when they try to bring standard UX practices into clinical environments, why Eric thinks of every role as a gig, and what he'd prioritize if he were managing someone's job search like a product.

Topics Discussed

✅ Why specializing beats generalizing and how to niche down even when it feels risky

✅ How transferable skills work in practice: why experience in one highly regulated industry (like finance) can open doors in another (like healthcare)

✅ The biggest blind spot people bring into healthcare UX

✅ Why "recommendations are where insights go to die" and how to tie research to decisions and numbers so stakeholders actually act on it

✅ Treating every role as a gig and why that mindset is more practical than it sounds in today's job market

✅ Why posting consistently on LinkedIn is one of the highest-leverage things a UX professional can do in a job search right now

✅ Where AI genuinely helps in UX research (desk research, competitive analysis, automating the time-consuming parts) and where to draw a hard line

✅ What neurodivergence in the workplace looks like from the insideduring a job search

Links & Resources

🔗 Eric Shumake on LinkedIn

🔗 HXR Labs

🔗 Eric's Maven course on breaking into healthcare UX

🎯 How I can help with your UX job search

📋 Get my UX case study template

👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube