Transitions, April 2004

Issue 2, April 2004

The best portfolio in the world may not get you a job
Smart employers don’t hire a portfolio. They hire people—people who can function in complex situations. When looking for a new job, successful designers understand that they have many different sets of skills to offer prospective employers. They must demonstrate this through their portfolio and more.

Executive director’s letter
As students make the transition from school to studio, they face a variety of challenges. Obviously, getting a job is the first one. AIGA offers chances to meet practicing designers through chapter events and to make connections with available positions through Design Jobs at www.aiga.org/designjobs.

This newsletter helps you in developing your presentation of your skills, as do other resources at www.aiga.org/students. You should also seek comments on the way you present yourself from professional members in your community.

Mentors are particularly helpful. In fact, the need for mentors is a challenge AIGA wants to address. One of the ways we are trying to do this is through providing brief examples of design heroes from famous designers and every member who would like to add his or her own story. You can read about others’ and add your own at www.aiga.org/designheroesforum. Be sure to explore this anthology of brief stories, since it may help you in discovering your own models for the future.

We know that it seems difficult to find jobs right now, although I hear every day about how studios are finally beginning to grow again. The next decade is going to be a very exciting one for design and AIGA is committed to finding ways to support you, as a member, in growing to fill the potential of the profession you have chosen.

For some of you, we are offering two capstone educational experiences: IIID AIGA summer academy on information design in Sweden and the Rocky Mountain High Ground interdisciplinary design workshop led by Katherine and Michael McCoy in Denver. Both are in August, although registration will close earlier.

Richard Grefé, executive director, AIGA

THE BEST PORTFOLIO IN THE WORLD MAY NOT GET YOU A JOB
The end of the school year (and possibly, your graduation) are just weeks away. This can be a time dedicated to creating a portfolio of your work as you plan job interviews or summer internships. Since we spend so much of our design education making artifacts and objects, it makes sense that we put emphasis on these things to demonstrate our abilities. Yet the design skills on display in a portfolio are only a small part of what is necessary to be a great designer. More importantly, evidence of great design skills may not be the most significant factor used by employers to make hiring decisions. Many times, I have heard design managers say that often they do not hire the designer with the best portfolio. When I was an executive creative director in New York and Miami, I often made decisions to hire the most well rounded designer, not the one with the superstar portfolio.

Smart employers don’t hire a portfolio. They hire people—people who can function in complex situations. When looking for a new job, successful designers understand that they have many different sets of skills to offer prospective employers. They must demonstrate this through their portfolio and more.

A portfolio cannot demonstrate many of these skills. So don’t rely on your shiny new portfolio alone to represent you and what you have to offer. It is not enough. However, don’t worry. You have more skills than you think. You just need to identify them. With a little reflective thinking and some self-assessment, you will be able to reveal all those skills not visible in your portfolio by communicating them or by showing them in action.

Some skills don’t go out of date
Everyone understands the importance of listing skills on resumes. Probably you have a section of your resume that lists specific technology skills for hardware and software. While these are important and relevant in your role as a designer, these are the kind of skills that can quickly go out of date. For example, how good is it to state your proficiency with Dreamweaver ZX 2010 when all the really hot designers are using GrandMaster SuperCollider 2.0?

There are some skills, however, that never go out of date. These are the skills you gain from working, playing, and living. It is important to consider that you develop valuable skills just by showing up at school everyday on time and prepared for class. You develop skills by volunteering, babysitting, waiting tables, gardening, bartending, lifeguarding, dating, golfing, voting, selling Girl Scout cookies, doing construction, housekeeping and feeding the pets.

The skills you develop from living are the core building blocks for being successful in any activity, especially at work. These skills are called transferable skills because you transfer them from one task to another, one job to another, and one career to another. They don’t go out of date; they just get better with practice and new experiences.

Gaining skills from life
You have been developing skills that are transferable since birth. Remember the coach who said that it is not about winning or losing, but how you play the game? Remember when you first struggled to tie your shoes learning to go over and under with the lace? Remember when you memorized the multiplication tables and learned long division? Similar lessons provide some early experiences for working with people, working with things and working with information. Most of our interactions and activities can be grouped according to these three subsets.

Within these subsets, skills can be ranked as higher level and lower level skills. For example, if you are an employee at McDonald’s, you will necessarily need skills for working with people. If your skills for working with people are more basic your job responsibilities might be focused on taking orders from customers. If your skills are more advanced, you might focus on supervising and instructing staff and negotiating with vendors and suppliers. In most work environments, higher-level skills are associated with increased responsibility and greater independence in making decisions. Lower-level skills are associated with following directions and a greater degree of supervision.

To identify your specific skills think about skills as action verbs associated with each of the subsets.

Working with people
Almost every form of work requires the ability to interact with other people. Essential transferable skills include verbal and written communication, teamwork, and the ability to follow or lead others. Working with people also requires skills for achieving day-to-day priorities like being effective, productive and responsible.

These are core skills for anyone in any job or profession. Just to function in a workplace everyone needs good skills for working with people. Think about different skills related to communication and interpersonal relationships and consider how they can be organized into levels of accomplishment:

• Listening, telling, persuading, influencing, inspiring
• Receiving, serving, supporting, training, managing, supervising, mentoring

Since designers are fundamentally concerned with communication, it should be obvious that it is essential for designers to have highly refined communication skills. To determine communication design objectives, designers need to be able to formulate precise questions and listen actively to understand the needs of their client and audience. To successfully collaborate with various experts for communication problem solving, communication skills are important to describe what you know and don’t know in ways that avoid falling into the traps of egoism and territorial attitudes.

Designers utilize communication skills not only to get their work done, but as an important part of the work itself; communication is an essential part of our knowledge base and expertise. We must account for all the variables in the construction, “Who says what to whom, through what channel, to what effect.” To determine, develop and implement communication solutions, designers need to understand how audiences perceive and interpret messages based on cognitive, social, cultural and physical factors. As I tell my students, “You can’t be good at visual communication, if you are not good at communication.”

Working with things
Some jobs require skills for working with objects rather than working with people or information. Surgeons tend to work with their hands on organs or other body parts while general medical practitioners may spend more time with patients as individuals. Auto mechanics tend to work with their hands on engines and other mechanical parts while car dealer financing agents work with data in the back office.

In professional careers like graphic design, sometimes the distinctions are less clear. Before the advent of digital, networked technology there was more division between working with things and working with information. Design production was very separate from design ideation. While both activities involve working with things, the designers who did most of the thinking spent more time with clients while designers who did the making spent time in the back of the studio. Other vendors like typesetters and graphic arts reproduction houses were involved in the production process, too. Many of the activities of designing were the domain of highly specialized craftspeople organized by sub-disciplines. Now, computers can allow us to be engaged with activities of making and thinking more simultaneously.

While these activities may seem more integrated today, it is important to dissect the skill sets you use when designing. Separate the skills for working with things from the skills for working with information. This should allow you to more clearly communicate your varied and different skills. The ability to distinguish these different skills may also help you to improve your overall design process by identifying those skills that are strengths and those you need to improve.

While excellent digital technology skills are essential for designers, those same skills tend to be shared by the greatest number of entry-level designers. So while they are necessary, they may not do much to separate you from the crowd. Higher-level skills will allow you to differentiate yourself and to advance further in your career:

• Assembling, repairing, troubleshooting, manufacturing
• Building, crafting, drafting, sketching, engineeringWorking with information

Since designing is a process for clarifying, visualizing, humanizing and communicating messages, our most fundamental activities involve working with information. The messages on a business card or on the cover of a book or magazine have a clear information hierarchy that needs to be prioritized. An annual shareholder report contains qualitative narrative information and quantitative financial information that must be shaped and structured. Signage systems must present visitors with the directional tools necessary to find a destination. Election ballots must allow voters to make individual decisions and allow data to be collected so that collective decisions can be administered. As a designer you utilize information as content for designing all of these solutions.

In the process of developing solutions, you must also work with information as a way of discovering problems and finding solutions. To design the cover of a book, you work with more than the information documenting the title of the book and the author’s name and theme, plot and narrative. You work with data that informs an understanding of the intended audience and point of distribution and cost and competitive context and cultural milieu. Your ability to work with this kind of data requires a set of transferable skills that include research and planning, analysis, critical thinking, problem identification and problem solving:

• Comparing, compiling, prioritizing, analyzing, synthesizing
• Testing, developing, planning, defining, researching, identifying, innovating
• Writing, proofreading, editing, publishing, critiquing

Getting to know your self
If you are able to clearly describe all of your skills you will be able to effectively present yourself to potential employers and clients. To get to this point, do a few exercises intended to help make a list of all of your transferable skills.

In the book What Color is Your Parachute, Richard Bolles suggests that you write seven stories that describe important situations in your life where you set a significant goal that required some effort to achieve. In each story, describe:

• The goal you wanted to accomplish
• The obstacles you needed to overcome (self-imposed or otherwise)
• Your step-by-step process to achieve the goal
• The result of your effort

After writing the stories, look for the key actions in each step. These actions will probably indicate transferable skills that you utilized to achieve the goal. In his book, Richard Bolles provides some easy to use tables to help identify transferable skills. He groups these as interpersonal skills, physical skills and mental skills.

Another helpful exercise is to make lists of your experiences.

• Make a list of every job you have ever performed. Include volunteer and club activities, sports and significant experiences since starting high school.
• Make a list of every course you completed in college. Use a copy of your transcript.
• For every job, activity or course write a sentence describing the key task performed and underline the action.

Some examples:

“While working at Jake’s Clam Shack, I expedited orders from the kitchen to the waitstaff.”

“As the treasurer of the Marching Band Club, I organized a fundraiser.”

“In my Social and Cultural Behavior anthropology course, I compared examples of human behavior from different indigenous groups.”

“In my Marketing Research course, I defined market research objectives for a business start-up case study.”

Make a list of all your transferable skills. Also, distinguish higher-level, complex skills from lower-level, simple skills and know the value of skills in a given context. While simple skills are not necessarily less important than complex skills, it is important to remember that the real value of a skill is determined by the need or demand for the skill along with availability (or lack of availability) of people who can perform the skill.

Personality matters
Sometimes people confuse transferable skills with personality traits and behaviors. Someone might say that they always have a good attitude or that they are attentive to details. These are not transferable skills. These are styles and manners for utilizing skills. For example, if you identify that “editing information for clarity” is a transferable skill that you possess, you might state that you are “attentive to details when editing information for clarity.” By linking your transferable skills to desirable personality traits you can document powerful and unique qualifications that will be valued by employers.

Keep in mind that not everyone views personality traits and behaviors the same way. While you might think that your proclivity for coming up with your most creative ideas in the bathtub is an admirable quality, many hiring managers might view you as unable to contribute essential skills within the appropriate environment.

Getting it all together
Armed with your portfolio and a thorough understanding of your transferable skills and personality traits, you should be able to present yourself as a total candidate. Use your transferable skills when describing experiences on your resume and refer to them in conversations during interviews.

Focus on communicating the highest-level skills that are relevant for the job you want. If these are the skills that are most valued by your potential employer, you should make a good fit. Your opportunities will be enhanced if you prepare in advance by learning as much as possible about the people and the business where you interview.

While much of the design work in your portfolio might speak for some of your ability to work with things and with information, you need to make sure that you fill in all the remaining blanks. Your ability to communicate transferable skills will be further proof of your ability to work with people, things and information.

Read more about transferable skills:
Bolles, Richard. What Color Is Your Parachute? Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2004.
www.dwd.state.wi.us/dwd/publications/223e_28a.htm
www.d.umn.edu/student/loon/car/self/career_transfer_survey.html
www.pch.gc.ca/special/cyberstation/html/szone2_e.htm

Read more about personality traits:
www.capt.org/The_MBTI_Instrument/Home.cfm
www.personalitypathways.com/

 

Christopher Vice is chair of the Department of Visual Communication Design at Herron School of Art and Design and principal of sine qua non, a design consulting practice. Christopher was Vice President of Brand Marketing at Sapient. Previously, he focused on brand strategy and communication design for Global 500 companies including Mercedes-Benz, Citibank, SBC/Sterling Commerce and Viacom. Other work includes editorial design for The Getty Foundation, Beach Culture magazine, Surfer magazine and Southern California Institute of Architecture. Christopher’s work has been featured in publications including IDEA: International Graphic Art Tokyo, Brandweek, ID magazine, Architectural Record, Communication Arts and Émigré.

Publisher
AIGA Transitions is published once a month, September through May, nine times a year by AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts), 164 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, www.aiga.org. The executive editor is Christopher Vice, chair of the Department of Visual Communication Design at Herron School of Art and Design. AIGA Transitions is a benefit of student membership and is not available to nonmembers. AIGA seeks articles for this publication from knowledgeable, respected and experienced authors whose opinions are deemed relevant to the student and educator community. The opinions expressed by the authors are theirs alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or judgment of AIGA; further, they represent only one point of view and are not intended to be an exhaustive treatment. For further discussion of the issues with your colleagues and peers, please visit the AIGA Design Forum at www.aiga.org.