Don’t Let the Design Talent Shortage Affect Your Business: Up-skill Your Own Designers
Designer demand
Since engineers created the web, many professions have hybridised to focus on the ever-changing purpose and need of digital products and services. Developing for the web has become more complex and now needs a whole suite of designers focused on improving customer experience.
These hybridised roles like User Experience Design (UX) and Service Design (SD) are in high demand, and require many design professionals to up-skill and change the way they think and approach design.
More businesses are now looking for UX Designers, rather than coders, to help them develop and evolve their customer service offering.
Nick Deligiannis, Managing Director of Hays Australia, believes that over the next five years design as a profession will be considered as much technical as it is creative.
“A new wave of designers formally educated in human-centred design — taught to weave together research, interaction, visual, and code to solve incredibly gnarly 21st century problems — will move into leadership positions. They will push the industry to new heights of sophistication,” he explains
These new heights of sophistication mean businesses will need to prepare now for what they will need tomorrow, and training their own in-house staff will provide them with a greater return in the future.
Prepare now for tomorrow
According to Andrew Balint, former Head of Marketing at Amaysim, some of the job shortages in digital are in the areas of UX Design, with some media agencies rumoured to have a 50 percent skill shortage.
“What we’re seeing is banks mopping up all of the UX Designers at the moment. It took us six months to recruit someone. We ended up recruiting someone from overseas. We had no other option,” explains Andrew.
With large, Australia-based organisations like Amaysim struggling to find people with digital design skills, what does that mean for the smaller fish?
Andrew explains that in some areas people with a specialised skill-set could not be found, so Amaysim resorted to training its employees.
“Digital marketers will become, not useless, but within 18 months they’ll become certainly less useful to the business over that period of time…So one of the impacts on us is a robust training and development program, which is a dollar impact as well.”
The influence of design on customer experience
For businesses large and small, designers are becoming an integral part of improving the delivery of customer experience. The experience of a product or service is just as critically important to the customer as it is to the business. UX Designers bridge the gap between aesthetically pleasing designs and the customers’ experience of those designs, whether they be digital or physical.
According to an Infosys survey, close to 90 percent of customers are willing to pay 25 percent more for a better customer experience. And that customer experience relies on sophisticated knowledge of how customers perceive and interact with the world around them.
A User Experience survey also found that over 70 percent of brands will conduct User Experience testing within the next year. If this is correct, where will companies find UX talent? And how much are companies willing to spend on bringing UX talent to Australia?
With that said, businesses must look within themselves to continually train and educate their current employees. At Academy Xi, we believe companies who invest in their employees education will see the dollar benefits roll in. User Experience and even Service Designers need to constantly refine and develop new skills if they wish to stay on top of their game.
For a designer who takes the Academy Xi User Experience Design course, the experience of how users interact with their designs can enhance their ability to create designs with real world impact.
Invest in your employees today and reap the benefits tomorrow. For more information check out our range of full and part-time online courses.
