RE: UKNM: Skills shortage? No. Investment shortage? yes

[Hales, Mike]

I totally disagree that the academic courses are of no use. We have a

multimedia student on work experience with us @ Ginger, who's in year 3 of a

four-year course, and he's been an absolute star. Perhaps we got lucky with

the student and course, but Stef's being a bit sweeping in his

generalisation.

mike


-----Original Message-----

From: Stewart Dean [

SDeanScient [dot] com (mailto:SDeanScient [dot] com)

]

Sent: 13 March 2000 16:28

To:

'uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

'

Subject: RE: UKNM: Skills shortage? No. Investment shortage? yes



I have to disagree that an academic course will always be a hindrance

compared with experience. If you do not have the grounding in a subject

experience may only teach you how to do it wrong quickly. My degree is in

interactive system design - this entailed a lot of high level usability and

system considerations, much of which has to be learnt and is not common

sense.


It's fair to say I learnt more directly useable skills in my first two years

of work (and deadlines were tighter than academia) but it became clear my

HCI knowledge is incredibly useful and many sites that don't work don't work

simply because they arnt designed to be used. Many visual designers get it

right by trial and error and often good visual style does not translate in

to good interactive design (nice jpegs shame about the interface).


You can get this knowledge via the many usability books out there but it

requires you study how people constructed things not the end result simply

because good usability design is often next to invisible, unlike visual

design.


In the industry as a whole visual design is still more highly praised than

interactive design. Usability knowledge is very much in shortage in the

industry - resulting in a misunderstanding of what design actually means in

regards to interactive media.


To sum up yes experience is vital in new media but that is easy to pick up.

I would say there are good academic courses out there that I personally

would see as putting someone ahead of someone with a degree unrelated to

what they are doing. Put it this way if a designer turned up for an

interview without a portfolio would you know by talking to them if they

could design a web site?


Stewart Dean

Customer Experience ||  Scient

www.scient.com  ||  www.webslave.dircon.co.uk


> From: 	Sam Carrington

>

Reply To: uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

> Sent: 	Monday, March 13, 2000 1:27 PM

>

To: uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

> Subject: 	Re: UKNM: Skills shortage? No. Investment shortage? yes

>

> Stefan Magdalinski wrote:

> >

> > I've never really taken much notice of what people's degrees are or

> > where there from, because I've never seen any correlation between it and

> > talent, or understanding of the web.

>

> > a few things work for me; enthusiasm, intelligence, a good collection of

> > previous URLs. Experience of Front Page, Dreamweaver, and actually

> > having been on a New Media course would probably count against you,

> > because I've never seen any academic work in this field that wasn't

> > drivel.

>

> Fair comment Stef; my course was far from being a "New Media Course". If

> anything it was more grounded in traditional media production techniques

> and theory, and gave a broad technological overview. I've had a few

> years experience since graduating and I have to say I learned more in

> the first two years of real work than I ever did on the degree.


[Sam says: msg chopped...]



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