I’ve been offering free CV reviews for graduates and thinking about ‘professional practice’. The proliferation of design diplomas means new graduates are spat out of a one year degree with a weaker portfolio than most and an inflated expectation of how much work is out there for them. If there are plenty of design courses, there must be plenty of jobs right? Right? Well…no. The economics that support education have never had anything to do with industry needs. I myself graduated from an industrial design degree with 71 other students when there were probably about 5 junior positions available in the whole of Québec. And this was in 2004.
In the UK, most businesses (of any industry) are SMEs with no HR department so your best chance of getting an internship or a junior role lies in making yourself visible and liked by the founders. Most employment opportunities will start with relationships unless you’re looking for a job in government or a multinational corporation (in which case you better be ready for pointless psychometric and other types of tests).
If design is never going to be a meritocratic, egalitarian, equitable industry to get into, we have to act accordingly. If it rewards the loudest voices rather than the best ones, who cares what’s in the CV? It’s what’s around it that counts. If we reframed design as a ‘practice’, ie something you’re always working on no matter what employer, we might help students and graduates continue to work on building a body of work regardless of who is paying their bills. Writing a blog, giving talks, doing design work and submitting it to competitions, doing videos on TikTok is all part of that body of work.
Your first employer should have found out about you at a graduate show (because you stood beside your project), because your work was covered by design publications on their social media feed, because you presented your work at an event or you talked to them at a meetup and met with them for coffee. Being visible will trump spending all day applying for jobs on Linkedin every time and it’s about time we shared this with students long before they graduate.