Largely Unemployable

Having read/consumed/devoured A List Apart’s newest issue on the state of web design education in higher ed, I have enough thoughts for 15 posts here about about the two articles, and also about my experiences as a student pursuing a career in web design.

But first and foremost, props to Leslie Jensen-Inman from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for conducting 32 interviews with industry leaders from the world of web design and development, having asked each of them the following questions:

1. What skills and technologies should colleges and universities teach students who want to be web designers and/or developers? Why?
2. Should students be educated in both web design and development or just one? Why?
3. If you could create your dream curriculum for web design and development, what courses and information would you include? Why?
4. What courses and information now in such programs would you eliminate? Why?
5. What type of projects do you want to see in a recent graduate’s web design and/or development portfolio?
6. How can colleges and universities keep web design and/or development curriculum current and relevant?

Read all the answers.

Some of my favorite responses:

James Archer: The culture of large educational institutions has, in my experience, consistently proven itself unable to cope with the demands of such a varied and fast-moving industry. I know many good people are trying, but I’ve yet to see anyone come out of a university program knowing what they’d need to know in order for us to hire them. Most of the time, they’ve been brought a long way down the wrong path.

Andy Budd: I’d definitely drop Flash from the curriculum. It’s far too easy to learn and leaves a lot of graduates who think they have web design skills, when they are actually largely unemployable.

Jeff Croft: schools are not looking at the web as something new—they’re looking at it as an extension of things they’ve done before. I suspect another problem is that they’re using the same old instructors that have taught graphic design or computer science for years to teach “web design,” and not using web-savvy experts …colleges and universities are going to have to get over their accreditation standards and hire the people doing great work on the web today to teach. That’s really the only way. They can’t keep giving the same old dude that’s been teaching PASCAL for 25 years a Dreamweaver book and call it “web development.” It doesn’t work. Likewise, they can’t expect the same folks that have been teaching graphic design for 30 years to really be competent web design teachers. They need new blood—people that really understand this stuff and are passionate about it.

Rob Weychert: Hire faculty that are motivated to maintain their own continuing self-education (just as many of us in the work force do, largely via the blogosphere), and have schools fund it whenever possible (conferences, workshops, seminars, etc.). I hear too many horror stories about schools teaching sorely outdated practices.

Christopher Schmitt: We can teach design. We can teach programming. But teaching the merging of design and technology into a usable site is something I haven’t seen addressed in colleges.

Cameron Moll: There’s a line drawn between fine arts and technology in degree curriculum, and never the twain shall meet. So either students leave college very well-trained in the visual (graphic design), or very well-trained in the technical (web development, HCI, etc). Rarely do we see students, or programs for that matter, that offer a blend of both.