Graphic Design Training & Classes for Employees: Review Corporate Training Options

If your company even dabbles with consumer-facing products or services, visual communication is absolutely essential for ensuring that you are putting your best foot forward. Whether this involves the development of logos and merchandise, product packaging, or promotional material, it pays excellent dividends to have employees who are trained in graphic design skills. This training can also help you bypass the need to hire freelance Graphic Designers or other consulting firms. Read on to learn about what to consider when looking for corporate graphic design training options and to learn about the options that are available for onsite and online training.

What is Graphic Design?

Graphic design is a field of creative arts that focuses on projecting visual communication, often built of combinations of text, images, photographs, and other visual elements, with specific goals. Graphic design covers a wide array of different artistic disciplines and endeavors. Still, at its core, it is the act of using visual imagery to communicate with audiences and convey feelings and ideas that language alone wouldn’t be able to express. As a subset of the fine arts, graphic design skills are used in virtually every industry, but they are particularly prominent in advertising and branding. Advertisements, product packaging, logos, branded merchandise, and other promotional materials all demonstrate graphic design skills. Any business or organization looking to reach an audience will want to hire those skilled in graphic design.

Since graphic design covers a wide range of artistic disciplines, no two Graphic Designers will be working with the same toolset or on the same kinds of projects. Some will work in traditional print mediums, such as the publishing or magazine industry. Some will work on designing logos and branded merchandise for companies to place on billboards, hats, and other promotional materials. Some will work on digital projects, building webpages and mobile application assets. Others will design infographics, posters, and signage for activist organizations or non-profits. Graphic design is a wide-open field of diverse artistic endeavors, and learning graphic design skills will open many doors for creatives.

Read more about what graphic design is and why you should learn it. 

What Can You Do with Graphic Design?

Graphic design represents a wide-ranging field of visual expression, which means there is virtually no limit to the kinds of images that sufficiently skilled creatives can create. As the field of graphic design is so expensive, creatives can make use of their skills in both professional and personal contexts. As professional Graphic Designers, creatives will be tasked with building imagery that is both evocative and communicates complex persuasive ideas to their audience of consumers. Graphic Designers will build the iconography of companies and brands, build the images that audiences associate with those companies, and help construct memorable advertising campaigns, promotional material, and product packaging.

Graphic design skills are also useful for non-professionals who want to persuade large audiences. Small business owners, start-up entrepreneurs, or even creatives working in marketplaces like Etsy may wish to learn more about graphic design to build their brand identities and set themselves apart from their competitors. Activists and organizers can learn graphic design skills to build more visually appealing and persuasive designs for flyers and infographics. Politicians will hire graphic designers to build campaign materials. As long as someone attempts to communicate visually to an audience, they will benefit from either learning graphic design skills or working closely alongside someone who knows them.

Why Opt for Corporate Training?

The first question you should ask yourself is whether corporate training is the right path to benefit the long-term success of your company. Corporate training is a method of ensuring that your employees have the necessary skills training that is required for them to handle their day-to-day jobs and work with industry-standard tools. 

Corporate training in graphic design is ideal for any company that regularly undertakes projects that require some degree of graphic design (such as creating product packaging, designing webpages, or preparing branded merchandise and swag for trade shows) but has yet to build a full graphic design department. Companies that already have full-time Graphic Designers on hand are unlikely to benefit as much from this kind of corporate training, though offering individual training options to your design team is a possibility.

Corporate training is a somewhat middle-of-the-road option for companies. Large firms that regularly need the services of Graphic Designers are likely to have in-house designers who will only benefit from targeted training. On the other hand, companies that rarely need the services of a Graphic Designer are likely to benefit more from contracting freelance designers or studio firms. To this end, corporate training is the best option for companies that regularly need to employ Graphic Designers and want to build those skills in-house, particularly if they are branching out into a new part of the marketplace and don’t feel like they can hire dozens of new Graphic Designers.

Who Benefits Most from Corporate Graphic Design Training?

The companies that benefit the most from corporate graphic design training programs are those that want to ensure that the vast majority of the employees, either in their firm or on relevant teams, have a uniform knowledge of skills like InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. This is especially beneficial if you feel that your teams will regularly work on projects where knowledge of basic and intermediate graphic design skills is likely to provide long-term benefits to your company. Most corporate training programs only last a few days (at most, many are single-day training sessions), so they are unlikely to turn your staff into professional Graphic Designers (for that, you’ll want to hire skilled employees who have completed career-centric training courses in graphic design).

New Skills or Upskilling an Existing Workforce?

One of the first decisions you’ll want to consider is whether or not you’ll be starting your employees’ skill training from scratch or complementing their existing skills with additional training. Training your employees in a new skill can be a longer and more challenging than upskilling your existing graphic design teams. Still, it does work to ensure that all of your employees are on roughly equal footing regarding their design training.

All in all, the decision will largely depend on the size and existing skill set of the team of employees you aim to provide with training. Suppose you are looking to train a large number of employees. In that case, you may want to consider introductory skills training to help everyone on your team become accustomed to using a program like Photoshop or InDesign. By contrast, if you are working with a small team of designers, it might be beneficial to take their existing Photoshop knowledge and provide them with the advanced training required to use program functions that other employees are unlikely ever to need.

Onsite or Online?

Once you have committed to offering your employees graphic design training, you’ll want to consider the delivery method. Most corporate training programs offer the option to either have the training delivered at your corporate office (or other significant corporate location) or through live online instruction in a private digital classroom. Both training options have advantages and disadvantages, so you’ll want to consider whether or not it would be best to bring in experienced instructors or if you would prefer to have your students learn remotely.

The most significant advantage to in-office training is that it is likely to ensure that your employees are learning tools like Photoshop and Illustrator on the devices they are likely to use on the job. This will help make sure that there aren’t problems with a transition from a classroom to an office environment after the training is completed. Also, many students report that in-person training with a live instructor is the ideal way for them to learn, so opting for on-site training is a good way to help maximize the effectiveness of this training.

The other issue to consider when deciding on a delivery method for a corporate training class is logistical. Some companies or offices simply do not have the space or infrastructure required to run an in-person training course for more than a few employees, forcing you to choose between running the course online or trying to find a workaround that may limit your ability to run a class effectively. While in-person training may be the more effective option, it will quickly become less effective as you introduce more and more complications to the process.

Training Options for Employees

Noble Desktop offers a wide range of corporate graphic design training options for companies looking to ensure that their employees are trained in applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign. Noble offers paired-down versions of its bootcamps and its career-certificate programs for employers who want to help their employees master a new set of skills. Alongside these longer courses, Noble offers a diverse selection of one or two-day training seminars. These classes include Noble’s Photoshop in a Day, Illustrator in a Day, and InDesign in a Day, each of which will provide employees with the training required to start using these programs in a professional setting. These classes have no prerequisites and are ideal for beginners to learn how to use these important graphic design applications.

Noble also offers a handful of specialized corporate training options, including an accelerated course in Photoshop Animated Gifs and a course teaching Adobe Lightroom Classic. These courses are ideal for supplementing training in Photoshop, making them a great way to upskill employees who know how to use that tool but have yet to master every aspect of the program.

Finally, Noble offers extensive training courses through corporate versions of its Photoshop Bootcamp, Illustrator Bootcamp, InDesign Bootcamp, and Graphic Design Certificate program. These multi-day classes teach students the intermediate and advanced features of a given program. The multi-week Graphic Design Certificate program is a great way to prepare your employees for more elaborate, professional graphic design work, as it will cover the contents of each Adobe Creative Cloud bootcamps.

Supplemental Training Options

Some employers may be interested in corporate training but are hesitant about live onsite corporate training for various reasons. For those employers, Noble offers an alternative option. At a discounted rate, corporate organizations can purchase seats in any of Noble’s open-enrollment training programs. This allows you to offer your employees the opportunity to learn graphic design skills (or other training options offered through Noble Desktop) at their own pace, either after work or on the weekends. This is a great way to give your team the opportunity to learn new skills without interrupting their daily workflow.

To learn more about any of these graphic design corporate training opportunities, please visit Noble’s corporate graphic design landing page or contact them directly at hello@nobledesktop.com

Key Takeaways

• Organizations looking to provide their employees with graphic design training may want to consider corporate training options.
• These training courses can be either introductory lessons on an application or more elaborate instruction in the advanced features of the program.
• Classes can be offered onsite at your corporate offices or they can be offered in private online classrooms.
• Noble Desktop offers the option to purchase bulk enrollment in its regular online classes if you would prefer to let your employees learn graphic design on their own time.
• To learn more about the comprehensive graphic design training options available for corporate organizations, please reach out and contact Noble Desktop today.