Study Overseas

"It's a billion pound business and it's all about luck. I'm not talking about the lottery. I'm talking about our bread and butter, designing and advertising. Why, where it matters most, at the grassroots of our business do we resort to the Mystic Meg approach? Because that's what it feels like sometimes."

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If you're an aspiring young creative, getting your first job in advertising or design can seem about as likely as your six numbers coming up. Like the lottery, there are some big prizes out there. And like the lottery, there are far more players than prizes.

But this is the future of our industry and we need something more robust than a crystal ball. "The fundamental role of Design and Art Direction's Education and Training Programme is to stack the odds in favour of the industry, attracting and recruiting the best talent and helping them to grow into the stars of the future." - Larry Barker, Chairman of Education, British Design and Art Direction.

Each year, Design and Art Direction (D&AD) invests over £1.3 million on running a range of innovative programmes that seek to identify talented graduates, support colleges and develop and train young creatives. This is where a lot of it goes:

Student Awards and Annual

Winning a D&AD Student Award is a pretty good way to shorten the odds on securing a successful future in advertising or design. For more than 20 years, the industry has watched D&AD Student Award winners go on to become top creatives.

The Awards invite students to submit work based on real briefs set by real clients across a wide range of advertising and design disciplines. So consistently good and educationally useful are D&AD's briefs that the Awards are now part of the course curriculum in many colleges. In 1998, the Awards attracted 1327 entries from 72 colleges, including several from overseas, and this year we expect even more entries.

Two years ago we created a superb showcase for young creatives by putting the winning work into a book, along with 150 of the best pieces entered. The student annual is seen by 1,700 top professional creatives in the UK and has become an invaluable source to agencies and people looking to recruit new talent as well as helping to identify those colleges and courses which consistently turn out graduates with high creative potential.

Advertising and Design Workshops

Since they began in the 1970's, D&AD's Advertising Workshops have been consistently oversubscribed. Last year, eight hundred applicants competed for the eighty places on the four workshops series run over the year.

The workshops are such a well established route into placements and real jobs that young hopefuls arriving unannounced on agency doorsteps are regularly redirected to D&AD. What they discover is a unique opportunity to develop their natural creative talent by working on briefs set by leading advertising agencies. Over six weeks, delegates get to visit these agencies to have their work reviewed and appraised by a series of senior creative teams, many of whom are themselves products of previous D&AD workshops.

Workshop delegates are also eligible to participate in the placement competition run in association with Pearl & Dean. The prize is a chance to compete in an international competition for young creatives and involves an all expenses paid trip to the Cannes Advertising Festival. D&AD's Design Workshops are similar in concept to the Advertising workshops: applicants compete for places and the workshops are hosted by leading consultancies. Delegates practice their craft, make contacts, and not infrequently, get hired.

Training and development for Young Creatives

There is an assumption as old as this business that creativity is an innate talent which develops naturally through exposure to the creative heroes at the top of the tree. While this remains true at least in part, the related idea that creatives can learn all they need to learn in-house, from their creative director, is due for re-examination.

Conditions in the industry have changed. Because of the sort of pressure they work under today, creative directors simply cannot deliver the amount of coaching and mentoring they once did. Equally important, technological change and developments in ways of doing business mean that today's creatives need new skills and understanding which are probably best acquired outside their own agency or consultancy environment.

Last autumn we started to define these needs through a research exercise involving the creative departments of a variety of agencies and consultancies. The findings resulting form this research will be known by summer 1999. Combined with the experience we have gained piloting our Mastercraft workshop series, we aim to produce a range of relevant and appropriate programmes by the start of 2000.

President's Lectures

Each year D&AD President invites great creative talents from around the world to share their experiences and insights with students, members and the public. The purpose is inspiration, and recent speakers include Terence Conran, Paul Smith, Janet Street-Porter, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam.

We have new and exciting projects coming up throughout the year and into 2000 which will increase the breadth of the education department even further. We believe they will be met with great enthusiasm and will be of enormous benefit to all those who participate.

Author

Claire Fennelow

Education and Training Manager

British Design and Art Direction