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On average, 26% of a design agency's potential income is lost through inefficiency, inaccurate quoting or free pitching. The variety of skills required in a design agency was highlighted by Charlie Hoult's decision in May to step aside as Loewy Group chief executive to become vice president of development. Hoult had led the group through a series of acquisitions and mergers that enabled Loewy to quadruple in size in four years. It was then felt that different skills were required to run the much larger organisation and Hoult moved to a position that would enable him to focus on what he does best: "doing deals and all that", as he put it.

Designers are famously bad at the business side of the design business. Designers like designing, they don’t do business studies and they don’t do the bottom line, says FLB creative director Colin Mechan.

In the Design Skills Advisory Panel’s survey on skills and training, 72% of designers said they lacked business management skills, while 44% said they needed better communication skills. The Advisory Panel was set up by the Design Council and Creative & Cultural Skills – the sector skills council for the creative industries – to improve training in the design industry. Research conducted by the Design Council and the University of Brighton in 2006 found that design is an industry that learns primarily on the job and where formal training and development is the exception rather than the rule.

The Panel’s recommendations, following its survey into training in the design industry, include the creation of a professional practice framework, which would recognise and promote good design practice, and the creation of a Design Academy to act as a centre of excellence.

Taking care of business
The Design Business Association (DBA) runs a range of courses aimed at making design consultancies more professional and, ultimately, more profitable. Courses range from professional practice courses for designers in their first few years in the job to presentation skills, project management, negotiating techniques and director-level courses.

Hannah Paterson, programmes director at the DBA, believes that creatives can be put off from getting involved in the business side of a project because they don’t consider it to be where their strengths lie. All our courses focus on building confidence. If designers have come from design school then they may not have been exposed to business skills before, but even account managers can benefit from taking a fresh look, she says.

Storm Brand Design, based in West Yorkshire, has invested heavily in training over the past year, including Open University courses in management and DBA courses for its account handlers. We hadn’t invested in training for some time and we felt it would be useful as a refresher for more experienced staff as well as for more junior staff, says sales and marketing director Trevor Flannery. The DBA helped us identify problems with efficiency, but it was a significant investment, particularly as it involved stays in London.

The DBA runs courses at a number of locations around the UK and this has enabled Cheltenham-based FLB to participate. Mechan believes that a problem with some training providers – he cites D&AD as an example – is they can be London-centric. The DBA is more national and holds a lot of things in Bristol, which is easy for us to get to, he says. However, he adds that FLB prefers to do the majority of its training in-house.

Jonathan Ford, creative partner at west London-based Pearlfisher and member of the D&AD education committee, also prefers to keep training in-house. We have done external training in the past and it has been a bit ‘one size fits all’. There is nothing like learning from your peers, he says.

A common complaint is that universities and art schools do not prepare students for the real world. However, Ford argues that it is unrealistic to expect them to do so and believes it is the responsibility of design agencies to find a new graduate with creative ideas and potential and then shape them into a great designer. Our biggest problem is in taking on people with a significant amount of experience; then they often feel they have come to teach us something. We have had much more success at growing our own designers.

Ford insists that training should not only be specific to the consultancy but also to the individual. Pearlfisher operates a system of staff reviews to monitor progress, and give staff an opportunity to talk about any gaps they feel there may be in their knowledge. We have a copywriter who asked to join a writing group and go on an external training course. We only have one writer, so in those circumstances it doesn’t make sense to do training in-house, he explains.

The future and beyond
However, Ford is adamant that while it may be appropriate to outsource training in certain specific skills, consultancies should not be sending staff out to learn how to design.

D&AD was aware of this widely held view when it decided to launch its Workout professional development programme – after all, can creativity be taught? D&AD director of education and professional development Laura Woodroof explains: We conducted two years of research before we began the training programme. We found designers didn’t want anything prescriptive or didactic and they hated the word training.

The Workout programmes were initially targeted at the advertising industry. The creative department is often isolated from the rest of an advertising agency, and while most agencies will do a lot of training for the sales team they don’t for creatives, says Woodroof. The Workout programme is advanced industry training aimed at creatives. Courses include: ‘Where do ideas come from, Mummy?’, ‘Selling the idea’ and ‘Packaging – beyond the box’. Woodroof explains: We don’t teach people how to design; it’s about finding new ways of working and improving skills such as model making and 3D structural awareness.

Last year, design consultancy Elmwood worked extensively with D&AD to create a bespoke training programme. We chose D&AD because it is specifically for creatives. Courses per se are generic, so we did a little bespoking to make sure they were absolutely suitable for us, says Jayne Barrett, head of learning and development at Elmwood. We got really good feedback from the courses. We had a lot of new people at that time and we moved people around so they were on courses with people from our different UK offices – so it was team building as well, she adds.

After doing the D&AD courses, Barrett says the agency realised the number of skills it had in-house. As part of making our leaders even better, we are using their expertise to share with others. She adds that budgets have also been tailored according to the impending credit crunch.

Elmwood also runs a programme of continuous professional development called Beyond 21, which includes what it calls ‘inspiration days’, inter-office working and a buddy system. Beyond 21 is based on networking and nourishment and Barrett insists it is essential that training and development are seen as core to an agency’s way of working.

Whether consultancies choose to use external bodies or conduct training in-house, the important thing is that training of some kind does happen. For designers, focused on creativity and ideas, business skills can often get neglected, which can make it harder to convince clients that your idea is the right one. However, if the ideas aren’t there in the first place then you’re in real trouble. After all, where do the ideas come from?

DESIGN STUDENTS
Between 1996 and 2004 there was a 40% increase in the number of design graduates in the UK. In the year 2005-6, there were 60,000 design students. According to the Design Skills Advisory Panel, the total UK design industry is only double this figure, meaning design graduates face stiff competition.

However, the number of students studying packaging design has fallen, to the point where no UK universities offer courses in solely packaging design – in all cases it has been subsumed within graphic design.

Sheffield Hallam University closed its standalone packaging design BA to new entrants two years ago. Principal lecturer in graphic design Glyn Hawley explains that the packaging design course wasn’t getting enough applicants to be sustainable. He thinks one of the reasons could be the negative portrayal of packaging in the media. And although graphic design is increasingly taught in schools, packaging is rarely covered.

I think there is also a major interest in web-based design, which may reduce the numbers looking at more physical design, says Hawley. However, our packaging design students are generally able to get good jobs, because they bridge the gap between graphics and the technical side – our students learn about thermoforming and structure as well as surface graphics. Hawley insists a greater emphasis on the structural nature of packaging is vital.

FLB’s Colin Mechan agrees that it is often technical knowledge that new design graduates lack, particularly print techniques. In packaging you need a broader awareness of print. For print advertising campaigns in magazines and such it’s just offset litho, whereas packaging could be dry offset, gravure, flexo, says Mechan. He adds that FLB has organised for IoP: The Packaging Society to give half-day tutorials to staff on print techniques to ensure everyone is up to speed.
When surveyed at the D&AD’s New Blood exhibition in June, designed to showcase new graduates, the most common complaint from students was that they had not had enough teaching about print techniques. Others felt they would have liked more guidance on where to look for vacancies, while some felt closer ties were needed between universities and the industry.