Too many design students, not enough jobs? Depends on your definition.

I think reading this is going to help me sleep a little more soundly. I thought I’d share…from Coroflot’s Creative Seeds Blog:

A smart and jarring post last week on Unbeige bluntly states: ‘Prepare to Find Another Line of Work’ Say Working Designers to Design Students. The sentiment is reasonable. In light of the current economic downturn, this sort of tough-love, meted out the previous day by designer Ian Cochrane and “branding guru” Michael Peters, seems entirely appropriate. “There is too big a supply of young designers and far too many people doing mediocre work,” Peters concludes, and legions of young design school graduates presumably hang their heads in shame, contrite for ever having nurtured such a frivolous collective dream as doing the things for which they were trained.

While some hard realism in an ailing economy is certainly appropriate, it seems like a slightly overwrought response, what with Cochrane suggesting design school students go work in restaurants rather than try to get jobs designing them. I say overwrought because it comes from a deeply polarized view: either you do precisely the sort of real design job that school convinces you is appropriate to your ideals, or you ditch the whole thing and go bus tables. No discussion of the variances within the design economy as a whole. No suggestions of less obvious fields for which design training is highly applicable. Just “pack it up, you’re not good enough.”

There’s a touch of egotism here, and I don’t mean on the part of the two very talented professionals to which these quotes are attributed; I mean the design community as a whole. A rigid pecking order tends to get established early on in the creative professions, where a handful of highly desirable job titles are labeled “real design” — the most conceptual ones, typically, with the least amount of logistical encumbrance — and the rest dismissed as a misapplication of our creative prowess. Woe be to those who end up taking a position with “engineering,” “media,” or god forbid “marketing” in the title, for they forsake their true nature. Or something.

The more realistic advice to design students might read more like this:

You’re in a competitive field. If you’re studying automotive design, for example, you’re probably not going to get the job cranking out car renderings for Porsche all day — there just aren’t that many jobs like that out there. Same goes for shoe design. Or magazine cover illustration. Or interior design for high-end boutique hotels. If it’s a prestigious, high-profile job, lots of people want it, and some of them are probably better than you. Sorry.

For every sexy job, though, there are 50 of the more mundane variety that also need your skills. Of your graduating class, one or two of you will be doing the job you currently envision. The rest of you will be managers, marketers, copywriters, trend consultants, researchers, social media specialists, human factors engineers, technologists, etc. etc. etc. You’ll be using skills you learned in design school on a daily basis: branding consultants who sketch communicate their ideas more easily. Iterative problem-solving of the sort they teach you in a design program is good for solving all sorts of non-design problems. And design problems crop up in lots of unsexy places. And provided you put as much effort into finding a good fit from within this other, much larger job pool, you’ll probably be pretty happy.