How my formal design education differs from UX bootcamps
hate for bootcamps will never falter. I’ve even went as far as to attempt to create my own educational program to battle it, but alas, it is not a mission that I can tackle successfully right now.
When I wrote my article about whether to choose the self-taught route or the bootcamp route, the immediate conclusion was to be self-taught. And the best thing you can do for yourself statistically, though I hate this option personally, is to actually get formal design education.
But I’m not here to argue about any of those options today. There are multiple ways to actually thrive in your UX and design education, but I’m here today to share about how formal education trains designers and why designers who teach themselves following a similar framework would be more successful long-term than those who don’t.
This is how you literally set yourself for success from Day 0: when you start learning design.
While my diploma had the perfect name of “Experience and Product design”, it was not a UX design program.
We did touch upon interaction design to practice user experience in the digital world, but most of what we were doing is slogging away at workshops and ateliers, chopping wood by hand and learning how to fix 3D printers when they jam.
Do I need to cut a dovetail joint to do my work today? No.
Did learning a bit of 3D modelling, visual design, origami and 100+ other ‘useless’ design skills help me with my career today?
The T-shaped professional vs the I-shaped professional
There is a reason why design school education is seen as far more elite and is at a standard that bootcamps will never be able to catch up to, despite being far from ideal.
The three to four years of design education, while widely unpopular with many graduates (even me), explores a magnitude of design skills. Most of us graduate only using 5%-10% of what was taught.
Everyone loves to talk about the T-shaped professional, but before you can even get to a T, you need to start with a 一* (Pronunced ‘yi’ in mandarin).
*This is a cool symbol to use because 一 means ‘one’ in mandarin. It’s literally step 1 of how to start your design career, which is building a broad set of skills.
Every design skill you’ve touched upon helps you build that horizontal expertise. Without that long list of horizontal skills, you can never form a T-shape in your career, you’ll only be an I-shaped professional.
Design schools intentionally set their students up for long-term employment in different market conditions. So it makes sense to enforce a wide array of skills, even though it does seem like a waste of time overall since their graduates’ would never practice everything in the first decade of their career, and at any given point of time.
But here’s the thing about formal education: it makes you less susceptible to market shifts. My schoolmates who caught onto the UX trend a little late were still successful transitioning into the industry because of how well-built our horizontal disciplines are.
Learning multiple design skills allows you to hop from one design industry to another a lot easier. While it cannot make up for the experience you don’t have, it’s worth noting that it saves you a lot of pain during the transition process.
If you’ve been to a good design program, you would be able to transition from graphic design to UX to other similar disciplines in a matter of weeks, without the need of bootcamps or certifications*.
