Experience. Real-world experience. Project experience. Research experience. Problem-solving experience. Working-in-a-team experience. UX-design experience.
That’s the kind of experience that hiring managers think is gold. When we talked with managers while doing research for the Unicorn Institute, we found that they were uniformly disappointed with the amount of experience that recent graduates had.
We asked managers which they’d choose: a design-school graduate who had a decent grasp of theory and some solid experience, or a design-school graduate who had an excellent, deep knowledge of theory without any experience. In every case, they said they’d choose the student with the solid experience, even if their theoretical knowledge wasn’t as complete as the other.
Granted, they understood these folks had spent the last two or four years in classes. And many of the graduates were well versed in the theory of great design.
Experience prevents mistakes. It moves things forward. There’s an old saying:
Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgments.
Hiring managers are looking for the glimmer of good judgments from these graduates. The managers don’t need amazing experience. They realize that starting from zero experience is a lot more difficult than starting with some experience.
Experience can’t be layered on top of a design education
Schools are trying to give students experience. They put projects into the classes. They encourage internships.
Unfortunately, the class projects are usually too short and narrowly focused. The students don’t get the breadth of experience needed to complete a real-world UX-design project.
Apprenticeships could also be a great solution (especially thanks to folks working hard on them, like Fred Beecher ). However, today there aren’t enough businesses offering them. It’s hard for a graduate to find one that also pays well enough to help with student loans and post-school expenses.
Internships and apprenticeships layer experience on top of the student’s design education. It’s not baked in. They are not bad (in fact, they are quite valuable), but they won’t work by themselves.
Experience baked into the education
We think the best solution is to build experience into the education, integrating it directly with the studies. To accomplish this, we’ve made long-term projects a core component of the student’s curriculum.
As each Unicorn Institute student learns a new UX-design topic in their classes, they’ll return to an ongoing 3- to 5-month project. Under the guidance of our full-time faculty facilitators, they’ll look at integrating what they just learned into the project work.
These long-term projects will be 60% of the students’ time in school. They’ll see how design projects start. They’ll see them go through the research stage and see first-hand how solutions are chosen. They’ll take the project through the development stage, working with professional developers to implement their ideas and deal with real-world constraints.
In the two years each student will be studying at the Unicorn Institute, they’ll have as many as six of these long-term projects under their belt. That’ll give them a diverse set of experiences they can bring to their first job.
We also give our students experience working with one of our Partner Companies through an internship. But we don’t just lob our students off into space. It’s all connected to the program. We know that these internships will actually give our students quality, real-world experience.
That’s exactly what will make the hiring managers and students excited!