Wakefield College relaunching flagship web design course

Wakefield College are celebrating the remarkable employability success of its web design students, and are look forward to even better results when it relaunches its FdA Web Design course in September.

Three generations of Wakefield College students James Bell (left), Craig Burgess (middle) with placement student Tim Stringer (right) pose with the relaunched course website at The Design Mechanics office.

Three generations of graduates from the course are all currently working at one of Huddersfield’s most successful design agencies The Design Mechanics, and other graduates have gone on to work at other top UK agencies including Three Rooms in Nottingham and Barnsley-based Consumer.

Dave Pannell, Creative Director of The Design Mechanics said “We’ve taken graduates from all colleges and universities in the area, but over the past 12 months we’ve started taking graduates exclusively from the web design course at Wakefield College. I’ve been able to build up a great relationship with the course and we see the new students coming through every year. But because the college has actually gone to employers and said, “What do you want? What do we need to make sure our students know so that they can hit the ground running as employees on day one?” means I can have them working on live projects straight away.”

This employability angle has lead the college to relaunch the course in the Foundation Degree format, which gives a lot more scope to develop it compared to the traditional HND qualification. This relaunch has been done in conjunction with a number of industry experts and aims to provide the students with a unique armoury of skills and knowledge.

Steve Smith, course leader said, “We’ve always got local companies involved with the course through our industrial liaison programme, but I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to achieve with the new course. I believe it’s like nothing else in the industry. We’ve had some of the most experienced industry professionals in our area helping to write the course content and telling us bluntly all the problems that they have with employees – especially those straight out of education – so that we can address them within the course. For example, design isn’t just about being able to lay out a nice looking page. Students need to understand that if a client is paying £1000 for a job, that only £300 of that might be profit – and if they make a mistake on a job that has to be redone, or if a job takes twice as long as they estimated then they are going to loose their company money. At the moment graduates are having a hard time entering the employment market, and I think it’s this invaluable industry knowledge that has made our students so successful.”

The first year of the new FdA Web Design course starts in September, and already has a number of industry professionals involved to be guest lecturers. Anyone interested in applying to the course can visit the website at www.fdawebdesign.co.uk or contact Steve Smith on 01924 789802.

Links

Foundation Degree in Web Design

ENDS
CONTACT: For more information email info@wakefield.ac.uk, or telephone 01924 789 789.
DATE: 18th August, 2009