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[MUSIC] [Music] so doing my morning, walk to work and I started thinking about the fact I don’t have to show a bachelor’s degree or a certificate or proof of any of that when I got this job. I just showed up demonstrated like my my ability showed my portfolio and interviewed and got the job, so I guess the question is. Do you need to go to design school to be a designer? Alright, you want to be a doctor? You want to be a surgeon? You want to be a lawyer? This is not the video for you. You better go to school, cuz. If I come to the hospital, what to be done on me? I’m hoping you went to college, but if you want to be a designer. This might be the video for you, but don’t go run into your mama when I tell you not to go to college. Cuz that’s what I’m about to do. I’m gonna tell you not not to go school, So just stay with me because everything. I say in this video, it’s gonna be my opinion and my experience and there might be other people that have different opinions and different experiences. So just take everything. I’m about to say with a grain of salt. I feel like I’ve worked a pretty varied career so far in my short amount of time doing what I do, not a single time, not a single time did any of those jobs while applying ask to see my bachelor’s degree ask to see a certificate program of any sort, not a single one, and so what do we say about that when it comes to higher education right now? What do we say about that when it comes to our craft as designers What? What should we be doing then? Because I I’m not saying that a bachelor’s degree doesn’t matter. I’m saying when it comes to being a designer. If you know, that’s what you want to be, It may not be the most important thing for you, but in my opinion, what are the things that are important If I want to be a designer? Okay, like, how do I go from? Zero to sixty. Like you’ve never done anything like involving design before. How do you learn some of those fundamentals? Punta Punta mental. How do you learn some of those fundamentals of design? How do you learn the craft and the skill? And and how do you do all that? If you don’t go to school, well, let’s do a little backstory, okay. I think if you want to understand where we are right now when it comes to education, you need to understand where we’ve come from, And this is just how I think in what I see. We came out of an industrial revolution where everything was about industry, and so therefore, if you wanted to do something that required some sort of skill that was an industry. You needed to go to school for cuz. Those were the only places you could learn them. If you wanted to be an accountant if you wanted to be a lawyer if you want it to be anything that was outside of those trades quote-unquote trades. You needed to go to school. There was nowhere else to learn them, so just we’re not in the Industrial Age anymore. We’re in the information overload age right now. There is so much information available to US online at any point in time via your computer or your device, it’s madness, okay, and so all of a sudden colleges are not the only place that offer information colleges are nothing only place that offer you the opportunity to grow and learn something new and develop a skill. Well, here’s what I will say about school, and and here’s some of my concerns. Is that the average student in the United States? The graduates with a bachelor’s degree graduates with a 30 to $40,000 debt in their lap And that is ridiculous debt is awful and and the thing about the debt Is you got to think about it. Like exponentially because when you’re at 30 to $40,000 in debt, that junior designer position where you’re getting paid, thirty thousand dollars isn’t actually thirty thousand dollars. It’s more like $20,000 because you need to pay your student loans and those student loans drag out over years and they just call. I would prefer that young designers getting into the field wouldn’t come into the field with all this debt in their lap, but they come with this opportunity just to immediately start. You know, focusing less on financial kind of like frustration and immediately go into the career and just worry about making cool stuff and doing cool projects. So if the jobs that? I’ve interviewed for haven’t asked me for my degree. What have they asked me for? And I think, like an underlying question is not just what they have. What what have they asked before? But what if they just required from me and subconsciously just expected of somebody interviewing for these positions? We’ll, number one. Here’s something that I’ve seen every position interviewing me. Ask for a portfolio. They don’t care about what you did in school. Unless what you have from school is your portfolio, so they’re going. What did you make? What have you made and and more importantly, what have you done lately? It’s like a team turns up whoo! Sorry, oh, stop singing! What have you made lately? What what what are you into making? What do you like? What is your strengths? What is your talent? What what level is your skill at? How can we utilize you? Those are the things that employers care about number two. What’s your work ethic like? I mean, References and character references are huge nowadays, and I’ve even heard of employers like stalking people on Facebook and Instagram because they want to really truly find out who you’re with in my current position, my employers, they wanted me to come in and sit down and work with the team for a couple weeks as like a trial run because they want to make sure that. I fit with the team and not that. Just I had some sort of degree and so ready. Your character really matters, and that’s not something you necessarily learn in design school, and then thirdly, the thing that I’ve seen a lot of people just requiring from me is loyalty. They they don’t want to spend a lot of time pouring into me and training me on how they do things and their processes and their workflow. Also, they don’t want to get attached, two people just to have them bail for some sort of bigger, better deal out there, and so they want to know that you’re not the person that’s literally looking for new jobs while you’re at your current job, so being a loyal person, it’s really interesting because these traits kind of sound like some of the things that my grandfather’s age expected of him hard-working loyal, skilled, not necessarily college educated, and so I’m really excited to be in our field right now, because it’s less about what you know and more about what you can do. It’s true that what you know helps what you can do and your abilities, but where you learned what you know, it doesn’t matter so much anymore. Try think that little puzzle through Because that was a difficult one. So if you’re a new designer or you’re not a designer yet but you’re thinking about wanting to get into the field and the question on your mind is should. I go to school. I’m gonna go ahead and say no to you, But then the question comes OK, what should I do? Then how could I possibly learn how to be a designer without going to school? And so I have a couple recommendations for you number? One just start making stuff. Okay, just start making some and again it doesn’t have to be on the computer. Start designing things in a sketch book, start designing things out of craft paper and scissors, start designing things and like everywhere you go with anything that you can number two. I would say, start observing. Okay, start looking around you in everyday life. What looks good? What doesn’t look good? Why do you think that looks good? And why don’t you think it looks good? Start writing those things down, and you’ll start creating some kind of like patterns in your mind as to. Oh, so the more intentional something was and these colors put together in these combinations. Those look good. Why do those look good? Those are great questions to start asking, and that’s literally some of the first things you start learning in design school number three. I would say, don’t give up your day job until you feel like you’re confident in the things that you’ve learned and that you can do or the things that you can make. So if you are waiting tables or like tending bar or whatever you’re doing, keep on doing that, but do this in your spare time hustle on the side and learn this new skill. There’s some huge to be said about hustle next. I would read a ton of books because the cool thing is that the information is readily available to you anywhere. You’re at, you can go to your local bookstore and pick up all sorts of books. You can find recommendations as to which books are like good ones to start with, and so if you want to learn about like Web design or like interface design or just design in general, there are books out there for you, and you can grab them and read them, and I don’t mean to pull like Good. Will Hunting but like you can learn everything you can learn at a college with, like a library card or like, 15 bucks in your pocket. Another one would be that. I mean, Youtube and all the learning platforms that are out there like Youtube is Freeza, Super great. But there’s other ones out there that teach design teach development teach creative things, and and you can look at all those online courses and you can pick one and they’re like 15 bucks, sometimes or on Youtube. There’s stuff for free on how to design or how to use a certain design program, and I just think that you can learn so much people are no longer. Do you have to even get a teaching credential to be a teacher which side don’t watch out for bad teachers? But there’s so many people kind of sharing this wealth of knowledge. It doesn’t make any sense for you to immediately go out and sign up to spend $60,000 on an education when you can find a lot of really talented people teaching the same things online. Lastly, and this is important, no matter if you’re doing online learning or reading books or just doing stuff and creating stuff like on your own. If you don’t have a drive and a work ethic to do it, then you’re not gonna do it. You see one thing that colleges do and do well is? They require from you. They give you a grade. You either got an. A you either got a nap. You either passed or you failed and you can continue on or you. Can’t continue on. It requires some self motivation and some hustle from you to do it on your own, but the truth is, you can do it. You can do it. If you just set up some habits and some routines and you really drive the ball forward. You could be making things in six months. You can have a portfolio fully built out in six to eight months. This took somebody else three to four years. You could already be working. You could already be debt-free. You could already be moving in your career before they even got out of school. There’s nothing wrong with not going to school. If you want to be a designer, so should you go to design school or art school if you want to be a designer? I guess that really depends on what you want. The big question is, what do you want? Do you want to be a designer? You can do that on your own. Do you want a college experience? Fine, you can go pay for it, but if you really want to be a designer, if you really love solving problems and creating things and and making things work and and seeing the light, go on in people’s eyes as they look at your designs and it makes sense. If you want to do that, you can do that right now. I hope you guys are designing amazing stuff. I hope if you don’t know how to design that you jump in. I hope you guys follow your dreams, and you guys fulfill your goals. I hope you guys hustle and make it happen. I’ll talk to you guys next time. Aloha, you!