From the Founders – July19
Another month has passed since our first founders blog post. We started the month with the launch of our IKEA UX project which aims to combat single-use furniture waste from on-campus Uni students.
Our learners are entering week 4 of that project and things are shaping up nicely for some really great work and responses to the project brief. We also saw two other projects complete their graduation with students from our Smiling Mind and Qantas project completing their final presentations.
Incredible achievement by all those students with both company partners blown away by the quality of the work that was presented. It’s incredible what can be achieved in 9 weeks from students who when they started the project had very little awareness of UX design. Here are a couple examples of the final presentations that sums up the level of learning that is possible on a project-based course. Special thanks needs to go to the two incredible mentors that guided the students on their journey, Lisa Huck for the Smiling Mind group and Ken Wong for the Qantas group.
Update on Employability Framework & Assessment
In last months post we touched on some work happening behind the scenes to develop v2.0 of our assessment process. Well, today we’re happy to share some more on what we are creating. This assessment model, better termed our employability framework is a deep analysis on the technical and attitudinal skills required to be successful as a UX designer. We have worked with leading psychologists as well as a panel of some of Australia’s leading UX hiring managers to create an employability and assessment model that will give our students a clear insight into how they stack up against an industry standard expectation of UX design capability.
One of our key goals with this model was to create a link between the skills a student has learnt over one of our projects and how that directly translates to real-world job aspirations. For too long there has been a gap between what traditional education has deemed a ‘distinction’ or ‘pass’ with no direct connection to what hiring managers are looking for. We believe our model has gone a long way to solve that disconnect and finally provide UX designers from Junior through to Senior a map for the skills they need to focus on to give themselves the best chance of employment in a modern workforce.
Our employability framework measures a students capabilities across a series of UX Technical skills as well as Attitudinal strengths that determine your impact as an employee in a business. These skills have been defined direct from the hiring managers making decisions on who would be employed in their teams around Australia as well as psychologists to get the correct definitions built into an assessment process. We’ve received input from hiring managers from Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, Deloitte Digital, Westpac, ABC, BT Financial and P2 Learning just to name a few. Each week more data is added to this framework and it is fast shaping up to be a world-first employ-ability scorecard for UX designers.
We’ll be providing all of our followers an opportunity to benchmark themselves on this employability framework and students in our future projects will have this integrated into their project work so they can actively focus on improving the skills that will ensure they have the best chance of employment as a UX Designer.
Stay tuned for more on that! Until next time…
