The Shillington School offers learning through theory and hands-on experience working from briefs under real-world timelines. The founder, Andrew Shillington, observed that it was hard to hire people with all skills necessary to be productive in an ad agency.
“As an employer, Andrew sought to hire talented young graphic design graduates but found it increasingly difficult to find those with high-end computer skills, a practical knowledge of design theory and could meet challenging deadlines. It soon became apparent that students leaving schools and universities were not adequately trained in today’s world of computers and design software. And so Shillington School was born.”
I’ve observed the same situation in the UX field. There’s often a mismatch between academic programs and the demands of employment. As an employer of interaction designers, I’ve had difficulty finding people who have a work-ready skill set right out of school. Most often, it takes a couple years working in a professional environment before someone picks up the necessary combination of design thinking skills, tools use, collaboration and facilitation skills, client interaction and project management, and general knowledge of how the business world works. When evaluating an applicant, I want to see their process and approach as well as finished work. Most junior level jobs only expose someone to pieces of a project, and don’t provide opportunities to experience the end-to-end process of finding insight, creating a concept, constructing a prototype or other artifact and validating that with actual users. It’s even less common that someone’s had that chance to do that work as part of a collaborative balanced team.
How can we create work that’s appropriate for a new interaction designer as they gain the full compliment of skills? In an agency setting, it’s possible to partner a less-experienced designer with a more experienced design partner. I’ve seen this work well, however an agency can only take on a limited number of new people in this way. It doesn’t help the individual practitioner who wants to work in-house, or start his or her own company.
What if we could treat apprenticeship as a form of entrepreneurial exercise? The apprentice creates a portfolio piece that follows an idea from research and concept identification to visualization and validation. With that as a basis, we’d just have to figure out how to extend that individual practice into an ability to participate as a part of cross-functional team. Ideally, we could create cross-functional teams and mentor THEM, but would that still be considered apprenticeship, or an incubator?