Design Education Made Easy: A Comprehensive Guide to Choosing the Right Course For You

When deciding what course to take there are so many different providers to look at and so many different individual courses to explore. It can make choosing the right course a very tiresome experience! In this article we’ve listed the important factors to think about when choosing the right course for you.

1. Taking your background into consideration

For students who are pivoting into design from a different career, many worry that the fact they have no prior experience, or haven’t studied design before, means they can’t take a course now. This is not the case. Just because you don’t have a background in design doesn’t mean you can’t learn it now. We have had students from all different backgrounds take our courses from university students, to dentists, to chefs, to marketing professionals.

Something you will bring into your design career regardless of your background is the soft skills knowledge you would have accumulated in previous roles. Skills such as communication, time keeping, receiving feedback and empathy are all fundamental  skills a designer should have in order to create human-centered designs and to be able to work successfully in a design team.

2.  What learning environment will you thrive in

Online learning vs. in-person. Big classes vs. small. Part-time course or one-week bootcamp. It’s important to think about what sort of learning environment you will most benefit from and you’ll leave feeling like you’ve accomplished everything you wanted to. Where some people prefer to learn online from the comfort of their own homes, others prefer the in-person aspect as they feel they have to be accountable for coming in. Additionally, whilst many of us are still spending a lot of our time working from home, some students may decide to do an in-person course because they already spend enough time on Zoom as it is! For this reason we run both online and in-person courses at Experience Haus to make our courses accessible to all. We also run courses in different formats (part-time, full-time, short and long) so there are options that will work for everyone.

One of the fundamental pillars of the Experience Haus learning is keeping our courses as small as possible, in order for everyone to progress as fast as they can. This is also to allow students, especially beginners with no prior experience, to feel comfortable asking questions and for the instructor to spend more time focusing on exactly what each student needs. You couldn’t get this in a group of 20+ students!

3. What are your goals for the future?

Something to consider when choosing a course is how it will help you achieve your goals. If your aim is to get a new job, will the course help you with a portfolio piece? Will there be any support offered after the course is completed? If you’re looking to get a promotion within your current company, will the course give you the skills to achieve this?

On all of our courses you will be working on a real client brief, whether that’s individually or as part of a small group, giving our students the opportunity to immediately apply what they have learned in a real world situation. The client project as well as stakeholder management experience will hold more weight on your portfolio as opposed to various example of hypothetical projects.

4. Learn from industry experts

When learning a new skill, it is essential that you’re learning from the professionals. It is not enough to just learn from a teacher who simply teaches the content of a course. You need to learn from someone who actually has experience doing the job! All our instructors are experienced design professionals working across a variety of product design, UX, UI, product management and service design roles. They come into classes with real examples of their experiences and challenges they have faced in their roles, making the design learning more interesting for students and easier to see how the different aspects of the design process can be applied in real life.

5. Affordable education

From free, online courses to 2-year courses costing over £30,000, there are a lot of different priced courses out there. In our opinion, learning a new skill shouldn’t be something that costs an arm and a leg, but at the same time, you should know you’re still being taught quality content. Our mission is to make our training fully accessible to everyone, which is why all of our courses are priced fairly and we offer flexible payment options for students to choose from.

There are many different factors to consider when picking the right design course for you. In our opinion, we believe we have all the elements across all of our courses that give you the best possible learning experience. Don’t believe us? Just ask the 1,000+ students we have taught who are now experienced professionals in the design industry.