Shaping design graduates: Developing and assessing core competencies

According to a recent survey of design consultancies and small to medium enterprises (SME's), higher education is failing to provide design students with the key skills required by industry. Many students lack the professionalism, communication skills, responsiveness, team working or the ability to multi-task. In addition, the prescribed structure and content of higher education design programmes (which often avoid multitasking and team projects due to time management and assessment difficulties), severely restricts the development of individual creativity or ability to work to their core competencies within a team thus attempting to replicate commercial reality. The future of design education may lie in understanding individual student competencies and streaming students within design disciplines. Product design and other creative programmes remain hugely popular with students wishing to develop their creative talent, yet academic systems do not attempt to identify students' individual strengths. Instead most curricula deliver the same material to classes, regardless of size or capability, raising the probability of producing designer clones. This paper will aim to establish that an assessment of individual core competencies and appreciation of student motivation could enable students to be streamed and offered optional modules during their second and final year's tuition to match and strengthen their core attributes. Students could then graduate from a creative programme having equipped themselves with essential transferable skills which can be applied in any industry situation but also with a focus on individual core strengths depending on options selected. For example, Product Design (Project Management); Product Design (Communications); Product Design (Ideation) or Product Design (Business Management) could be just some of the degree routes through a design programme. This focus on personal aptitude will be more attractive to employers who are looking to replace staff or recruit graduates that can demonstrate strengths in a particular area and make a specific contribution to compliment an existing creative team.