Reddit reviews Sketching User Experiences: The Workbook

I am self taught and design applications for human and system workflows at a Internet security company. I am biased but I don't think a degree will necessarily give you more hands on skills than just finding projects and building a portfolio to show your skills. There are many many different niche categories, every UX professional I have met have different skill sets. For example I tend in a version of lean UX which includes need finding, requirements validation, user testing, workflow analysis, system design, prototyping, analytics, and accessibility design (not in that order). I am interlocked with the engineering team so my job is FAR different than many UX professionals I know who work with marketing teams. They tend to specialize very deeply in research, prototyping, user testing, and analytics. Some UX types code and some use prototyping tools like Balsamiq, UXpin, Adobe etc. There is heavy debate on which path is more useful/safe/ relevant. Where I work I do not get time to code because my team and I feel I provide the best value to our engineering team and internal/external customers by doing the items listed above. The other UX person I will work with me on similar activities but then may be given projects to look at the best options for reusable components and code them up for testing.

TLDR:

• Depending on the industry the skill need will be different.
  
• Depending of the team the skill need will be different.
  
• There isn't one way to do user experience.
  
  
  Here are some of my resources I found helpful.
  
  (confessions: I've posted these before in other comments but I hope you find it helpful)
  
  Sub-reddits:
  
  
• /r/userexperience
  
• /r/hci
  
  Sites:
  
  
• http://ux.stackexchange.com/ <- Community to find and ask UX questions
  
• http://www.nngroup.com/ <- Read all the articles
  
• http://www.uie.com/ <-Video Training (More advanced)
  
• http://www.lynda.com/ <-Over 30 video training courses (Intro - may be more videos now... thats my last count)
  
• http://uxchecklist.github.io/ <-Intro to techniques
  
  Books:
  
  
• Don't Make me Think
  
• Designing with the Mind in Mind
  
• Lean UX
  
• The UX Book
  
• The Persona Lifecycle
  
• Sketching User experiences
  
• 100 things every designer should know about people
  
• Prototyping
  
• The User experience Team of One
  
• Interviewing users
  
• A Web for everyone
  
• See What I mean
  
• More here http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/
  
  Tools (other than typical Adobe design tools):
  
  
• www.usabilityhub.com <- great for cheap/free prototype validation.
  
• http://www.invisionapp.com/
  
• http://www.axure.com/
  
• https://balsamiq.com/
  
• http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
  
  
  MISC:
  
  
• Types of UX Job Titles
  
  

> if it comes anywhere close to creating graphics/icons/illustrations from scratch... I'm lost.

You know these are each discrete skillsets that you can learn with practice, right? You don't have to be particularly good at any of this to have a career in UX, but if your head is saying "I'm lost" that's not a nice way to feel. Have you, you know, tried reading some books?

Try this one: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/0123819598/ (you'll notice the tool they lean on most is a pencil)

Or pick you way through this list: https://medium.com/interactive-mind/the-only-ux-reading-list-ever-d420edb3f4ff

You can create a mock-up using flinto.com or some other mock-up tool. If you want to do one on paper you might look at this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Sketching-User-Experiences-The-Workbook/dp/0123819598