We’re so excited to announce that Northrop Grumman is Center Centre’s first partner company!
As a partner company, Northrop Grumman will get a first-hand look at our students’ design work as they progress through the program. Our students will gain real-world experience from Northrop Grumman. By working with mentors from Northrop Grumman, our students will strengthen their design skills and have an opportunity to interact with professionals addressing customer challenges. Meanwhile, members of Northrop Grumman’s User Experience team will see what each student is capable of and how they learn new material. For Northrop Grumman, this partnership helps provide a pipeline for talent in this demanding and rapidly growing discipline.
Northrop Grumman is a perfect partner. They design, develop and implement a wide variety of mission-critical systems, systems that are transparent and easy to use and that are enabled by user-friendly interfaces. Northrop Grumman’s User Experience experts help create designs used by people in high-stress environments, including air traffic controllers, police officers, firefighters, and soldiers, all who rely on well-designed software to do their jobs and fulfill their missions effectively. According to Mike Hübler, chief user experience architect and manager, User Experience department, “For people who face life and death situations, safety and accuracy are critical. In these high-stress work environments, having the right user experience is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.”
Dr. Neil Siegel, vice president and chief technology officer, Northrop Grumman Information Systems sector, told us, “We keep the experience of our users at the core of our decisions. User experience is so important to our goals and the services and solutions we deliver that we’ve made it one of our core technology focus areas.”
At Center Centre, we’re impressed with the depth of knowledge and experience of the Northrop Grumman UX team and thrilled they’ll be working alongside our students. Northrop Grumman will appoint four of their team members as mentors. These mentors will work with students throughout their two years at Center Centre. Mentors will regularly meet with students, constructively critique students’ work on an ongoing basis, and share skills that Northrop Grumman looks for when they hire designers.
Northrop Grumman supports a culture of lifelong learning. Each User Experience department member dedicates time to professional development. Their focus on continued education is one of the many reasons we’re so excited to have Northrop Grumman as a partner.
Center Centre students will work with the UX team on real projects for Northrop Grumman. These projects support the Center Centre curriculum. Mike Hübler said, “We look forward to working with Center Centre students, helping them sharpen their skills and as well as getting their perspective on Northrop Grumman projects. We’ll get to share our knowledge with the next generation of user experience experts, and Center Centre students will see what it’s like to work with our team and on the kinds of challenging efforts our customers face.”
Read more about why Northrop Grumman values our partnership.
If you’re working for a large company faced with growing need for UX talent, and you want to be a Center Centre partner company, let us know.