Reddit mentions of The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience

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
  
  

Hey there!
UX Designer/Researcher here. I came from a background in Psychology and Neuroscience research before UX Design. Personally I used the UCSD Extension for a certificate in UX Design. I really appreciated the course work and in conjunction with the Coursera Interaction Design felt like I was given plenty of exposure while also having flexibility to work.
From my experience in the industry, I would look into what area you are interested in. UX careers can involve programming and development, but I use absolutely no coding at my current position (at others I have though). The biggest selling point to an employer is showing an understanding of the process: wireframes, flow charts, user studies, iteration (agile/scrum/waterfall), and design understanding. I have worked on multiple billion dollar webpages and can say the process is nearly identical when scaled down.
If you are interested in some resources to start on your own I would recommend Simon Sinek's Start with Why for understanding how to look at design solutions.
Don Norman has many great books, including The Design of Everyday Things.
Some actual books to look at and learn on your own are A Project Guide to UX Design, Lean UX, and The UX Book. I highly recommend the last one I find it very thorough and digestible and for ~60 bucks is a reasonable textbook.
Lastly, once you have a grasp of UX as a concept I would get familiar with the Adobe Suite, Axure or InVision, and any others from career sites that you might not know about (I really like [Sketch]() as a cheap option ~$99).

Best of luck, feel free to ping me with questions