- Curriculum
- Teaching
- Systems
A five-month design curriculum
Built for people with no background, aimed at hireable
- Role
- Curriculum Designer and Lead Facilitator
- Timeline
- 2022 to 2024
- Team
- Multiple facilitators, cohorts of 60 to 200
- Platforms
- In-person and remote cohorts
- Status
- Running
- Outcome
- Over 1,000 designers trained across 15+ cohorts. Measured
The problem
Most design education produces people who can follow a tutorial and rebuild a Dribbble shot, then freeze at a problem they haven't seen before. Students finish knowing Figma without knowing how to frame a problem, make a call under constraints, or defend it to a product team. Real projects start too late, feedback is thin, and the portfolios that come out are full of hypothetical redesigns that tell a hiring manager nothing.
What made it hard
- Learners arrived with no design background at all, and had to leave employable.
- Five months, fixed. Every week had to justify itself against being cut.
- The bar was hireable, not finished. Completing the work wasn't the same as meeting the standard.
- It had to be deliverable by other facilitators. If it only worked when I taught it, it didn't work.
- Cohorts ran into the hundreds, so anything requiring one-to-one attention couldn't scale.
Three decisions
With what I turned down, and what each one cost.
Decision 01
Real briefs from week two
- Chose
- Students work on live, constrained problems almost immediately, before they're comfortable.
- Rejected
- The conventional sequence — fundamentals first, projects once the tools are learned.
- Why
- Tools learned without a problem attached don't stick, and confidence built on tutorials collapses the first time a brief is ambiguous. Starting with a real problem is uncomfortable for about three weeks and then it compounds.
- What it cost
- Early attrition rose. Some people want to feel competent before being tested, and this curriculum doesn't offer that.
Decision 02
Assessed on the defence, not the artefact
- Chose
- Students present decisions and get questioned on them. The reasoning is what's marked.
- Rejected
- Grading the final screens, which is faster, more consistent and far easier to moderate across facilitators.
- Why
- The screens are the easiest part to fake and the least predictive of whether someone can do the job. What a hiring manager is actually testing is whether you knew why. So that's what the programme tests.
- What it cost
- Much slower to assess and harder to keep consistent between facilitators. It needed a written rubric to stop it drifting into taste.
Decision 03
Written down so someone else could run it
- Chose
- Full facilitator documentation — session plans, rubrics, worked examples of good and bad answers.
- Rejected
- Keeping the programme as slides plus my own delivery, which is how it started and was working fine.
- Why
- A curriculum that only one person can teach isn't a curriculum, it's a performance. Documenting it was the difference between a few hundred people and a few thousand.
- What it cost
- Several weeks of writing with nothing visible to show for it, at a point when the programme was already succeeding.
What I’d do differently
I underestimated how much of the outcome came from assessment design rather than teaching. Changing what gets marked changed what students did far more than any lesson I rewrote. If I ran it again I'd design the rubric first and work backwards from there.