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First off, I don’t think that the statement “no one hires you based on potential” is exactly true. Straight out of school, of course nobody expects you to be an expert in everything. The first jobs out of school are just as much about learning and developing as they are about completing tasks and doing your job to help the company prosper.
Very much a give and take.
What is important is that the portfolio and your work let’s the employer imagine how you will develop at their firm and in the long run, will become a strong team member and possibly leader of other new recruits.
Looking at your portfolio, I can see that you have a pretty good understanding of your shortcomings. Identifying the problem is definitely the first step to rectifying them.
My advice would be to look at some of your projects and basically re-doing them. For example the Harley Davidson camera is an amazing opportunity for some great form development, sketches, orthographic PS renders and in the end, an exciting deliverable fully 3D rendered, photoshopped maybe onto a Harley or something like that. The possibillity for badass-ery are endless.
The setup is great and you have an amazing opportunity to wow with that one. Right now it really let’s the viewer down.
Thank you for your response bepster, I appreciate the advice you have given.
I probably worded that statement wrong, but basically I feel like no one will employ me based on the potential I have to grow with their company and give it my all to prove it to them.
That Harley project was actually one that I really enjoyed but at the time lacked the skills to best showcase my ideas. I wanted to develop a camera that gave the user the same feeling as starting a bike when taking a photo.
At the time I didn’t even know you could set the size of each component in CAD so most of that is just shapes. When I came to doing my portfolio I came to a point where I just needed to get out there and leave it in the past, focussing on the job hunt not what I need to improve on.
If I improved upon those skills would I be more employable and given where I am at now would you hire me if I showed ambission and drive to improve those shortcomings?
Well, improving your portfolio is your job hunt!
Revisit your projects so that they always show you current level of skills.
Moving on from sketching as it isn’t the only part of the design process I wanted to highlight my other skills and best showcase my thought process to potential employers.
So I know I need to work on my sketching, but I can sketch to communicate an idea. How do I put emphasis on my research whilst I develop my flaws.
Would you hire me or do I need to improve so much before I am employable?
To the OP: I think your portfolio fits right into more strategic design/marketing rather than pure industrial design. I know someone from my ID class who had a similar portfolio. She got a job in a marketing company straight out of college, doing that kind of design work. I guess you need to look outside of ID area to position yourself better.
I know for sure that there are a lot of tech start-ups popping up in Dublin, and they would massively benefit from your skillset. They need that kind of conceptual make-over. Also, since your education was in London, that would be of great value, because people from all over the world look up to London for conceptual marketing.
The reason why you are not getting replies from prospective employers is that your designs have no validation. You are presenting the idea, but nothing tells me how many people liked it over a certain period of time and how many disliked it and why. It’s easy to validate ID sketching, because the only source of judgement is your prospective employer. Sketching is purely his domain. In your case though, you are creating ideas that go straight to customer, so you need compelling evidence that they are going to work out with them.
Finally, join Quora http://www.quora.com and ask a lot of questions about concept validation. There are not much standard references on those, so asking the right people would reap a lot of rewards.
Best of luck!
Thank you so much for that advice experiMental. It is a lot to take in and think about as becoming a Design Strategist has crossed my mind a few times over the past few months.
But I don’t know if that is more because its what my school lead me to believe thats how you had to work to be good at ID. Like I said originally there was never any emphasis on skills, no perspective class, no form development and no marker rendering. All of our design work had to have some form of strategy behind it or else you just would not pass that unit. I know in my heart that I want my main focus to be ID whilst applying that background to help excel my own design and my team.
Also, I don’t actually even know how to approach a design strategist position…?