Design View / Andy Rutledge - The Employable Web Designer

If you’re a student aspiring toward a career in Web design, I think it would be prudent to reassess your current education or degree plan to ensure that you’re actually employable by the time you leave school. From my observations, the vast majority of students emerging from university, design school, and trade school lack fundamental skills and understanding necessary for the Web design professions (in all forms: experience design, interaction design, marketing design, communication design, information design, etc…).

Surely in large part this is the fault of our education institutions and the people who run them. These institutions are large, lumbering, and despite their liberal façade they generally have contempt for new ideas and information. So change occurs slowly in colleges and universities. There is good and bad that comes with this trait, but the result is that as professional requirements change—and they change rapidly in the constantly evolving eWorld—colleges and universities become less and less effective at preparing students for their careers.

Now more than ever, it is a student’s responsibility to craft his or her own career preparedness in addition to, even in spite of, the plans and curricula defined by schools.