I did the following, and I still keep doing them:
- Read UX books, read a lot to get an idea on how it works. You don’t need to read everything in-depth, but when you need to use some of the knowledge from what you read, you need to remember where you can go back and get it.
- Further education MOOC. Coursera, Udemy, UIE, Seminar
- Get to know great UX people online. Read with blogs, comment with something worth thinking and interact with them and become friends. LinkedIn Groups
- Keep yourselves updated with the latest UX-related knowledge. You can do this in multiple ways, but what I like most is to use Google Alerts. I wrote a blog post about this before — 5 Ways to Find Latest Updates of Your Favorite Topics: http://www.yingyingz.com/2013/02/5-ways-find-latest-updates-favorite-topics/
- Do projects. Find projects, e.g. help friends to build websites, or come up some projects by yourself. For example, I did a design concept for a public speaking community, both web and mobile, http://www.yingyingz.com/work/better-speech-web-mobile-app/
- Have an online portfolio, for example, mine is at: http://www.yingyingz.com/portfolio/web-design/
- Go to UX events. There are tons of events you can go to, you can find them via http://meetup.com, or sign up for some training class, for example, https://generalassemb.ly/ and Eventbrite http://www.eventbrite.com/ not just talk, get their business cards and keep in touch via LinkedIn, become friends