Art and design employability skills | Portfolio Oomph - Julie Read

Art and design employability skills

Art and design employability skills

Art and design employability skills

Art and design. We’ve been thinking a lot of about art and design and how it sits in the school curriculum. We hear from some students telling us that art and design is always the subject that suffers if a student has to catch up time with another subject, time is usually asked to be taken from the art studies first. Now why is this? Are the skills learnt in art and design not seen to hold as much value as those in other subjects? Hold on….what skills do art and design teach you anyway?

Art and design employability skills

So how many of you have been asked by your parents, friends, teachers the question ‘what will you learn if you go to art college?’ And some of you might find this quite tricky to answer – I know I certainly did! This is why we have been working on a series of videos exploring these skills.

“Employability bites” is a 15 part video series on Employability and Transferable skills learnt that are inherent to being creative. Each video is just 3-4 minutes long to give you an idea of how you might be using these skills day to day. And these skills are useful to ALL jobs, also skills that not all subjects prepare you in.

Employability skills are the skills that you need for the world of work – and they’re pretty important for life as well. By developing employability skills, you’ll improve your chances of getting a job and thriving in your creative career.

Transferable skills are skills and abilities that are relevant and helpful across different areas of life: socially, professionally and at school, they are ‘portable skills’.

I had no idea that I had acquired any of these skills when I left art college – but then, education was quite different in the early 1990s!! You might think that this is boring part of art college but actually, it’s the really exciting part (apart from making work of course) that happens as a bi-product of making great art.

Art education IS useful beyond learning technical creative skills and ideas. The more we harness this notion, the higher the profile in society the arts will become. Thought leaders believe that if more creative graduates were employed in banking rather than maths and finance graduates, the bank crisis wouldn’t have had quite such an impact.

Employability skills in art and design

When we work on our creative endeavours, we form habitual ways of working and these are the skills that we have outlined.

We’d also like you to join our free Facebook support group. This is an active group established by Portfolio Oomph for all students, anywhere in the world who are applying to art college/university.

It is a private forum to access advice, share experiences and artwork if you wish. We cannot provide personal tutoring or in depth feedback of work but we can give direction and some suggestions.

We aim to offer as much support as we can do in addition to the material that you may have already downloaded in our eBooks and eCourses.

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