At the outset, a database with thousands of antiques doesn’t sound that interesting. It’s hard to imagine the design challenges that might arise. Especially when you compare a database filled with antiques to, say, Google Glass or some other Silicon Valley invention.

And that’s the challenge we heard from hiring managers from organizations like Sears, JP Morgan Chase, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when we talked about attracting graduate designers. They felt their projects just weren’t sexy enough to attract the best talent. They felt new design talent wouldn’t see any interesting challenges to the work.

Yet, when you talk to the people who work for those organizations on those unsexy projects, and get them really talking, they get visibly excited. The problems they start to share are wonderfully interesting with nifty constraints and subtleties. Truly sexy challenges hide within these seemingly unsexy projects.

While it could be a marketing problem on the part of the hiring managers, I think the core of the problem lies at the heart of the design schools. Seeing beyond the surface, to uncover the sexy design challenges underneath, is a skill. A skill that schools should be teaching.

How do you teach it? One way is to ensure the students get to that underneath part when they work on their projects. These projects have to be assigned, because, well, who would choose something that doesn’t seem sexy on its own.

Once assigned, the faculty needs to show the students how to see the sexy design challenges and appreciate them. This process has to be repeated, until the students start to see the sexy on their own.

Seeing is a core part of design. Seeing the subtlety and nuance that makes a design project sexy is a wonderful skill to learn, because it invokes an excitement and engagement in the designer that takes the design to a new level.

That excitement and engagement is valuable to the hiring companies and it’s an attractive quality to see in students. Everybody wins when you can uncover the sexy that lurks within.

This is extreme. Of course, it’s IBM and they don’t do anything halfway. But to set up an entire design school for new hires seems extreme to us.

Here’s what blew us away: it’s a school for people already trained and experienced in design. Only a small portion of the six-month curriculum focuses on the IBM Way for design. Most of the time, students are learning basic and advanced design skills.

Every newly-hired designer (and many of the designers already in IBM) are sent to the school in Austin before they start with their groups. It’s an entire program designed to make sure everyone with the title of designer has the same skill set.

Every Company Needs Talented Designers

IBM has set a high bar as to the skills and knowledge their designers need to have. And they aren’t finding it consistently in the designers they’re hiring, especially those coming right out of design school. Therefore, they are doing what any smart company with the resources to make it happen could do. They are finishing the designers’ education.

Only a handful of companies have the resources to pull this off. Yet, every company needs to have talented designers. What are the companies that can’t afford to build their own school to do?

Understanding ‘Industry Ready’

When we started the Unicorn Institute research, we visited dozens of companies deep in the process of trying to hire designers. Every single one of them expressed the same angst: Many of the designers who are interviewing are lacking in substantial ways. Ways that prevent them from contributing.

Industry ready goes beyond being a critical thinker or a creative problem solver. Sure, those are important skills, but they are only a small piece of what a designer does.

An industry-ready designer knows how to go beyond just coming up with a design solution. They know how to navigate the murky waters of implementation to get it built, knowing how to compromise and work through the inevitable constraints that emerge.

An industry-ready designer is fluent in the full gamut of design tools. Not just Photoshop, but today’s critical tools, like JQuery, frameworks, and the various font toolkits. They understand the process for creating responsive designs and can use production tools like Git and SVN.

These companies are also looking for designers that understand how products are built and shipped. They understand how development and engineering processes work. They know when to push back and how to let something go.

The companies also want designers that can work as part of the team. They know how to send emails and attend meetings—something that’s surprisingly not taught in schools.

’Industry Ready’ is Very Nuanced

As soon as we started the Unicorn Institute project, we knew we’d have to dive deep into what it means to be an industry-ready designer. We made it a central goal of the project, with the hopes we can identify techniques for building a curriculum around it.

The great news is that we believe we’ve made some interesting progress on this front. Stay tuned to discover what we’re thinking.