Designer Requirements

This article covers the requirements for landing a job as a designer. Although the skills and tools designers use vary considerably between the many fields in which they work, what follows goes into the common-denominator job requirements for designers of all types. 

What is a Designer?

A designer is a person who comes up with designs—plans, drawings, schematics, renderings, and prototypes—of just about anything you may encounter in today’s world. Everything from a shampoo bottle to the outsides of airplanes had to be designed before they could become tangible realities. The designer is often the person who comes up with the idea for something and then comes up with the plans for it. Designers are idea people and creative types who possess the ability to see things that don’t exist (yet).

Designers come in as many shapes and sizes as the objects they design. You’ll thus encounter everything from Floral Designers to Mechanical Designers and Graphic Designers to UX/UI Designers. Each field requires specialized knowledge, but the threads connecting all of them are a creative spirit and artistic ability. Much designing today is done on the computer, using CAD (computer-assisted design) software, but the good old-fashioned ability to draw is still an essential tool in most designers’ toolkits.

Read more about what a designer does.

Education

As a general rule, designers are people with four-year degrees. These degrees are often specialized, such as a bachelor’s degree in fashion design for those who would be Fashion Designers or a bachelor’s in graphic design for budding Graphic Designers. Often coming in the form of a BFA (bachelor of fine arts), these are pre-professional degrees for people who’ve made up their minds about what they want to specialize in, although more general degrees in design are available. There are also Bachelor of Arts degrees in art, which cast an even broader net but can be corralled into a career in design.

Although HR Directors looking for designers generally look for candidates with bachelor’s degrees, there are cases where the four-year degree rule doesn’t apply. Some people have built design careers on associate’s degrees. There are also quite a few schools that offer fast-track pre-professional certificate programs that cover much of the material taught in four-year programs, with an emphasis on the technical side of design. In rare cases, you can even be a self-taught designer and finish your education on the job, although there unquestionably are surer methods for establishing yourself in a design career.

Read more about whether you need a degree to become a designer.

Experience

Design is one of those fields in which you’ll encounter entry-level jobs requiring up to two years of experience to apply for them. That poses the obvious question of how you will get two years of experience to get a job when you need a job to gain experience. Design isn’t the only field in which people trying to start careers must confront this paradox, but it’s no less annoying here than anywhere else. Most people fresh out of design school can’t afford another two years with no income, assuming they can find a long-term internship in the first place. There are ways out of this tangled situation, and the more prongs to your approach, the better.

First, ensure your portfolio is as strong as possible, even if it only contains school projects. There’s also no reason you can’t apply for jobs that call for experience when you have none: worse comes to worst, the bots vetting applications for the position will rule you out, and you’ve lost nothing more than the time it took to write a cover letter.

On top of that, there are ways of garnering experience without actually having that job with the big company you ideally want. There are internships, of course, which look good on resumes, but there are small-scale projects you can land with a certain amount of hustle. There are plenty of stories about designers who started their careers by designing menus for neighborhood restaurants.

Once you’ve managed to get in the door, you can expect to put in five to six years of work before being considered for a Senior Designer role. That time is spent not only garnering design experience but also gaining experience working in a collaborative work environment. Very often, soft skills (and the ability to market them) can spell the difference between getting and not getting a coveted promotion.

Skills

Design is a field that calls for a specific and highly developed skill set: it’s not a field you can expect to learn while on the job. To be a designer, you must possess the requisite hard skills to create designs on paper and computer. You, therefore, need to know how to draw a rough sketch of the thing you’re envisioning in your head, and you need to know how to turn your paper prototype into a set of computer drawings. That involves working in traditional artistic media and in such things as the Adobe Creative Cloud, the portmanteau name for Adobe’s creative software, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design, AfterEffects, and Premiere Pro. Other fields may require different software, such as AutoCAD, Rhinoceros 3D, InVision, Figma (useful for creating UX prototypes), and, for game designers, Unity or Unreal Engine. On top of that, talent as a draftsman can be extremely handy when it comes to architectural, mechanical, or interior design.

Above and beyond those “hard” skills, for which there is no substitute—you either can or cannot work with the requisite programs—designers require a set of soft skills that might not seem native to a creative temperament. The first is being able to work on a team since even Leonardo da Vinci had Leonardeschi to assist him in his workshop. The second is knowing how to accept and profit from criticism from team leads, managers, clients, and sometimes even fellow team members. That means being able not to take a critique of your creative “children” as a personal affront and to be able to subordinate your own vision to the overall needs of the project. That can be tricky for creative types. Equally tricky is having the ability to be creative on demand and to produce deliverables on schedule. You can say that you’re an artist and that inspiration comes when it comes all you want, but if you do, you’re likely to be an artist looking for a job.

Read more about what skills you need to be a designer.

Portfolio

To land a position as a Designer, you need a portfolio. It may be the most crucial ingredient in your job search. A resume attests only to what you’ve done; a portfolio shows what you can do. In today’s high-tech world, portfolios are online rather than the old-fashioned kind that carries leaves of paper (the etymological meaning of portfolio) and has handles and a zipper. Your portfolio should contain at least five of your best and most exciting projects that show off your abilities in a variety of genres and media while also giving viewers an idea of your personal style. If you’re a Designer, you’ll likely enjoy the challenge of creating a website where everything— content, typography, and overall look—can show you off in the best light possible. A strong portfolio will give prospective employers an idea of what makes you tick and, more importantly, show them what you can bring to their organization.

Resume & LinkedIn

Your portfolio should contain information about your experience and abilities, as it may be called upon to function as a de facto resume. You’ll also have to have a resume that goes into more depth about what you’ve done, where you’ve studied, and what skills you possess. A designer’s resume should also be as visually appealing as possible, as you will likely be evaluated on how it looks. (You’re a designer, so design.) Although there are a thousand schools on how a resume should be constructed, the basics of experience, education, and skills are always the same. For more information on how to craft that perfect resume, you can consult the Noble Desktop Career Hub article on the subject.

In addition to a regular resume, prospective employers are also putting more and more stress on LinkedIn profiles. This can begin to seem tediously repetitive—you are saying the same things repeatedly—but the LinkedIn profile has some differences from a resume, perhaps the most useful of which is that it has room for your complete work history. In contrast, convention keeps resumes to no more than two pages. Click the following link for further tips on creating a LinkedIn profile.

References

Resumes used generally to end with the time-honored line “references available upon request.” Everyone should have three professional references in their pocket to trot out when there is a request for them. References should be people who know you, know your work, and know your work ethic intimately and can converse about them. Ideally, a reference is someone who has supervised you, but you can consider tossing in colleagues if they know your work better than your supervisor might. And, of course, be sure that your references have good things to say about you in the first place. Professors and teachers make an acceptable substitute if you don’t have former supervisors you can use as references. The custom is not to use friends or family as professional references.

Learn the Skills to Become a Designer at Noble Desktop

If you wish to become a designer, Noble Desktop, a tech and design school based in New York that teaches worldwide thanks to the wonders of the internet, is available to give you the education you need to get started in this exciting field. Noble teaches certificate programs in numerous aspects of design and the technology that makes design possible in the contemporary world. These certificate programs offer comprehensive instruction in their topics and will arm you for the job market in whichever aspect of design interests you.

Noble has certificate programs in graphic design (the Adobe trio of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator), digital design (the main troika of Adobe programs plus Figma for UI design), UX & UI design, and motion graphics. All these programs feature small class sizes in order to make sure that each student receives ample attention from the instructor, and can be taken either in-person in New York or online from anywhere over the 85% of the Earth’s surface that is reached by the internet (plus the International Space Station.) Classes at Noble Desktop include a free retake option, which can be useful as a refresher course or as a means of maximizing what you learn from fast-paced classes. Noble’s instructors are all experts in their fields and often working professionals whose experience is invaluable when they mentor students in the school’s certificate programs 1-to-1.

Noble offers further design courses that are briefer than the certificate programs. You may also wish to consult Noble’s Learning Hub for a wealth of information on how to learn to be a designer.

Key Takeaways

• Designers usually have college educations, although there are exceptions. Fast-track certificate programs can and often do replace a four-year degree.
• Experience is an essential qualification for many Designer roles, posing the question of how you’re supposed to get work experience when you need the experience to get work. Internships and small projects for incidental clients can solve this dilemma.
• Landing a job requires a polished website portfolio, resume, and LinkedIn profile. You should also have a trio of solid professional references up your sleeve.
• An in-person or live online class from Noble Desktop can provide you with the requisite training for a design career.