How to land a job as a UX Designer

15 year UX professional here now managing a UX team. 

1. A background in psychology is a perfect base for UX. People skills like understanding people’s motivations and having empathy are arguable the most important skills in UX. You could be as much as 50% there already. Best practices you can easily learn, so are the tools you will use. Some familiarity with basic tech is required though so if you don’t have any I suggest start by building your own simple website in HTML/CSS. Plenty of free resources online to get started. 
2. To create good UX you’ll need to start recognizing good from bad UX design. Easiest way is to start using a shit ton of applications/services known for good UX. Pay attention to every step in the “customer journey”, little details make all the difference. Some obvious ones are Uber, Airbnb, Amazon/Zappos, Apple, etc. compare them with their competitors. Look for differences in the experience and how it’s affecting you as the user. For good Ux, look for leading/award winning apps/services in their respective industries. Again, plenty of resources you can find online. Harder to come by will be experience with B2B or enterprise as those are generally closed, however most of those suck anyway. Lots of these companies beginning to realize that now and are heavily investing in creating their own design departments. This brings us to the good part: for the above reason, many UX jobs are now flooding the market. 
3. Start building a portfolio with “mock” work. After you’ve completed the part where you analyze a bunch of other UX give yourself a fictitious assignment. For example, you’re asked to design a new checkout experience for Company Y. Think of who the typical user company Y would have, create personas, sketch some ideas, then move on to more high fidelity comps (Sketch), download some UI toolkits so you’re not spending hours just designing a button. Most importantly, document the whole process and include that in your portfolio. Show how you took the challenge, researched your user and then came up with multiple solutions with their own trade offs. In the real world you would launch the new experience and measure results through something like A/B testing. Even though you won’t be able to do the last step on your own it shows you thought about it. 
4. Lastly, find out if your company has a UX team already and get in touch. See if you can join some of their meetings or get a mock assignment that they can give you feedback on once completed. If they like you and your work you may be able to transfer and start building real world experience for your next UX job.