FORMAL EDUCATION AND THE READINESS FOR WORK IN UX: THE RESULTS FROM A MIXED-METHODS RESEARCH STUDY Ladislava Zbiejczuk Suchá, Department of Information and Library Studies, Masaryk University Arna Nováka 1/1, Brno, Czech Republic ABSTRACT In this short article, we focus on the topic of formal education among professionals in the UX field. The article provides some interesting insights - for example, that female UX professionals usually have higher formal education than men. The higher formal education is connected to the position of UX researcher, rather than UX designer. The higher the level of formal education our respondents have, the more prepared they feel for work in the UX industry. Based on the data, we make five recommendations for universities in the following areas: non-traditional forms of teaching, lifelong learning offerings, interdisciplinary collaboration, individual approach and mentoring and readiness of UX professionals to teach. KEYWORDS UX, Education, Survey, User Experience, Interaction Design Education 1. INTRODUCTION User experience (UX) is a field that has been developing in design practice since the 1950s (Nielsen, 2017) and has been growing rapidly since the 1990s (NNG, 2016). Along with the development of the profession, educational activities have emerged - whether in the form of individual courses or comprehensive curricula for degree programs. Several authors stressed that the competencies imparted by UX courses and programs may not always match the requirements of employers (Butiurca & Zancanaro, 2021; Chang & Lu, 2021: Girouard & Kang, 2021) - while the latter emphasize the acquisition of methods and tools, universities focus on cognitive and interpersonal skills (Branch et al., 2021). There are also several barriers to the development of formal UX education in universities: the lack of expertise in key UX competencies, the risks associated with establishing any new program, and the difficulty of finding the right disciplinary background for the interdisciplinary nature of UX (Getto & Beecher, 2016). The temporality of UX knowledge is also an important factor entering into thinking about university education (Kou & Gray, 2019) - curricula aimed at imparting relevant contemporary knowledge must respond to this temporality. In our research, we decided to focus on the topic of education professional training as part of a larger survey of UX professionals conducted in the Czech Republic and Slovakia . Our main research questions were: 1. What areas of education do UX professionals in the Czech Republic and Slovakia come from? 2. How do the areas of education differ according to the type of UX profession? 3. How does the level of formal education differ by type of UX profession? 4. Does formal education increase the readiness of graduates to work in the UX field? 5. Does the level of formal education affect the salary of UX professionals? International Conferences Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction 2022; and Game and Entertainment Technologies 2022 205