Since todays class was the first class we had for this module, we just had an introduction to placements and done some tasks to help us get thinking about what we are expecting to get out of placement. Using sticky notes we wrote down what we wanted from placement, and what we expected to get out of placement. There was a range of different things that were written down by the class, but the things that I wrote down were collaboration, good salary, relaxed environment, learning new skills, and gaining experience.
As you can see we separated the sticky notes into different categories. These were salary, projects/words, career prospects, management, environment, co-workers, skills. All of the categories were pretty evenly spread, showing that there are some key areas that are important to us all when we are on placement.
The next task was a game that we played with the people at our table. We each were given a random job, and by asking 20 questions, we had to guess what other peoples jobs were. This was quite fun but the purpose behind it was to get us to try and figure out problems quickly by asking questions and discovering as we went along what the job was.
The next part of the class we learnt about what makes a good portfolio when applying for design industry jobs. Some of the key takeaways I got from this part of the lecture is that it is important not to overflow the portfolio with meaningless text. Employers wont have time to read every single word, instead they will scan and look for key words and phrases. This is very helpful to me as I would never have thought that this is what they look for, instead I would have thought they would like to hear lots of fancy jargon and technical terms, but actually they don’t. hemingwayapp.com is a tool that can help point out sentences that are tricky to read and can help improve it. Another thing I learnt about portfolios was that conclusions are supposed to be at the beginning, instead of the end. This is because we are first of all showing what the product is, and then we show how we got there. We then split off into groups and we decided what we thought was important in a portfolio, and some of the most common answers where project design process, images, short concise text, and contact information. It was interesting to see what other people thought was important in a portfolio.
Todays class was very helpful for getting ready for placement. A portfolio is one of the most important things for a designer to have if they want to get jobs/placement, and this is the exact position that I am in with my placement coming up next year. The things that I learnt from todays class will be very valuable and useful for creating my portfolio which I will be doing over the next weeks.