Creating Strategic Awareness

Learning to integrate business goals into design solutions is the key to setting yourself apart from the competition. Strategic awareness is the understanding of your own firm’s business goals while recognizing that what you do affects your organization’s bottom line. Learn how to develop your strategic thinking skills – and recognize the key business issues that should drive your design and your firm. We’ll identify how you approach providing solutions in your work and start you down the path to reaching your aspirations for business and your career.

To Be or Not To Be (prepared, that is)

Successfully navigating our careers and our lives take a perfect (or not so perfect) combination of wingin’ it and workin’ it, better explained as preparation and improvisation. The truth of it is, with all the preparation that we do, we have to learn to be nimble and quick-thinking because the unexpected will ALWAYS happen and no amount of preparedness will get you through those moments.

Creating a ‘Career’ Brief

The overall purpose of a ‘design brief’ is to create a specific pathway to accomplishing an identified goal. Typical briefs include overviews, target audiences, challenges, and more. As designers we are problem-solvers, trained and hotwired to interpret and create. So, why not take those principles and skills and use them to create an ideal professional path uniquely your own? Sort through the seemingly endless possibilities before you, create a career map (past and future) to help identify patterns, create opportunities and be inspired to change ‘should be’ to ‘could be’.