Hey designer, these are the 10 skills companies request more often when hiring
This post is part of a series where I summarise the findings of our recent article in the International Journal of Design: ‘Graphic Designer Wanted: A Document Analysis of the Described Skill Set of Graphic Designers in Job Advertisements from the United Kingdom'.
In this first post, I talk about the 10 most requested skills by companies when recruiting graphic designers. The following 2 posts will cover (a) how the skills change when progressing from Junior to Senior positions and (b) the differences between working as internal (in-house studio) and external (design agencies) designer
Designers nowadays are requested to have a multitude of skills: it’s not only about technical design skills, such as knowledge about typography and photography, but also designers need to know a little (or a lot) of business, technology, coding, etc. etc.
If you are a designer, there is a good and bad side of these expansion of roles and responsibilities:
The good part is that you are expanding your work: you are not only ‘the guy/girl who makes pretty stuff’, but now people need your work more often and for different reasons: business, branding, coding, etc.
The bad part is that now you are required to master all these skills, because other people around you — or competing with you for a job — will have those skills.
For those responsible of the design education, this is a huge challenge. What to include and exclude from an undergraduate curricula? What skills are more relevant nowadays?
I am currently investigating in my doctoral studies at Aalto University — Department of Design — what companies look when they are hiring design professionals. Knowledge about what skills companies look can help design educators in better preparing their students to find a position in the market.
In this published paper, we approached what skills companies look when recruiting graphic designers in the United Kingdom. To find that out, we analysed more than a thousand job advertisements (1.406 to be precise) for graphic designers. In doing that, we unveiled (1) what are the most requested skills by companies; (2) how designers progress from junior, to middle and then to senior positions; (3) how the skill set differs for internal positions (in-house agencies) to external positions (design agencies and consultancies). If you are interested in the details of how we performed the data collection and analysis, I recommend you to have a look into the full paper.
In our analysis of the job ads, we built a list of 36 competences/skills/traits that companies seek when recruiting graphic designers. Not even a super-ultra-hyper-senior designer will be able to master such a big list of requests. To find what are the most requested skills, we counted how many times each skills was repeated across the 1.406 job advertisements. The results can be seen in the figure below.
In the figure, we show the frequency of each competence/skill/trait in our analysis. In each group, we defined a baseline to tell what is more and less requested. This baseline is the mean frequency of the group — the dotted line marked as M in the figure. In doing that, we were able to create a list of the 10 most requested competences/skills/traits. I’ll briefly explain each below in order of frequency.
The 10 most requested skills for graphic designers
1 — 2D Software — Software is one of the main tools for graphic designers. Therefore, it was not a big surprise that knowledge of software such as Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign is the most requested skills.
2 — Print and Advertising — Even though digitalisation is such a big part of the work of graphic designers, being able to deliver print work was the second biggest request by hiring companies.
3 — Digital design — With a small frequency diference, delivering work for web, interfaces, app design and so on was the third biggest request in our study.
4 — Acumen — This category can be summarised into one word: professionalism. Companies want someone who has a high standard in his/her work, attention to detail, committed and able to deliver top-notch work.
5 — Teamwork — Graphic designers are being part of interdisciplinary teams, being requested to interact with such a big variety of professionals. To do that, social and teamwork skills are such an important request made by companies.
6 — Project planning — Related to our previous group, graphic designers need to be able to take of multiple projects in different teams. Organize and follow deadlines in such a collaborative work is a constant request companies make.
7 — Aesthetic and creativity — As the 2D Software category, it was not a surprise that having an ‘eye for design’ and being creative was listed as one of the most frequent requests by companies.
8 — Presentation — Nowadays, designers need not only to get the hands dirty doing projects, but also they need to go and sell it later. It can be either to colleagues or clients outside the company. A good presentation can save (or kill) a good project.
9 — Detailing and production — A very technical skill, where designers are asked to know about print and digital production and techniques. Dealing with printing houses and know the ‘technical terms’ are also part of this group.
10 — Coding — One of the most debated (at least on design blogs) topic: should designers code? Our answer: Yes, almost one third of the companies were requesting designers with knowledge in HTML, CSS and so on.
As you can see, the list of skills designers need to have is long. I am sure companies do not expect you to have it all, and maybe what they write in their job ads sometimes is inflated. As these requests came after reading direct requests companies made in their job ads, it does not hurt to cover the basis and try to reinforce your skill set following our list above.
If you like, agree or disagree with your post, I would really like to hear your comments: paulo.dziobczenski@aalto.fi :)
