Students don’t know what actually goes on in an agency… not really. So today was a little inside look at how we work.

Our brilliant intern had shown a passion from day 1 to encourage his fellow students to understand that University is safe, protected (plug blog post) but they need to understand what actually goes on in the business side of web design / development if they are looking to progress in the world of work.

No preaching

So that was today. We had a load of questions sent via Facebook, on the kind of stuff they wanted to know. This was awesome, as it meant we weren’t just babbling on selling the company, but actually using it as an opportunity to inform and educate.

Turn out was great. Better than expected.

I kicked off with my bit, and guided them through a journey of what the company I work for actually does, how we get clients, how we keep clients, how we make money and some of the things that aren’t obvious to an outsider that we have to consider on a daily basis.

The hard truth

Then I lifted the lid on the can of worms that was “What you need to know (but probably aren’t being taught)” – note: the parenthesised part was kept from the lecturers present.

Ranging from cross browser testing (and yes, at least look at your site in IE6) to being aware of new trends, technologies and people, it was a quick overview of the kind of things I would personally ask or mention in an interview.

To me, the key message was an amalgamation:

Get or improve a web presence

You say you “love the web” but if you dont exist when I Google you, then I don’t really believe you.

Get “social”

Tweet, blog, add stuff to LinkedIn, rant, rage, express yourself… as long as it’s considered and informative, it shows a passion.

Get a site (better – make one)

In my eyes, you should always have a little bit of the web that is yours. It doesn’t *really* matter what is on there, but shows you’re investing in the web.

Learn, practice, fail: repeat

You won’t get it first time. No one ever has. BUT ITS OK. It’s what you do when you fail that counts. Mark Boulton did an amazing presentation at the Future of Web Design on Learning to Fail. Check it out and you’ll see what I’m on about.

“And over to Dex…”

And so our soon-to-leave-but-far-too-talented intern Sam “Dex” Hoult took centre stage. Amazing job, he spoke of his experience working with us, and what he has learned. He’s blogged about it here so be sure to check it out.

So, all in all a very productive day. Thanks to everyone who attended, and special thanks to Ian Fitzell for organising it, and to Dex for doing his bit.

What I’m discovering more and more is that there is a fundamental mis-understanding of what is required by the students to be industry-ready.

The life skills needed to be able to begin a professional career in a busy deadline driven web agency like ours are just not being taught.

Bright eyed students are coming out of uni full of degrees, passes, grades, distinctions, uni awards, a million facebook friends… and assume that is enough to be able to walk into an agency and be given a high-paying, high-responsiblity job.

Its not enough, but in their defence, students aren’t put in the environments to be able to know these things.

A cotton-wool path.

Nursery is safe. Kids are protected, looked after.

Primary school starts to teach core education, keeping the safe protected environment.

Depending on location, middle school allows further progression through the curriculum, in a safe protected environment.

Secondary school often brings with it life challenges such as relationships, growing pains, terriotorial clashes, but is fundamentally still safe, and the students protected.

6th form and college allows more individual expression, making the safe, protected environment feel like your own.

Then there’s university. You leave home. You stay out all night, anywhere you like. You drink more than your body-weight in alcohol most weeks. Relationships come, go, come back again, go again. You’re living life the way you want. As long as you make the grades, everyone is happy.

But uni still has the same core responsibilities of nursery. Students are safe. They are protected, and provided for (generally speaking).

And after uni? You’re dropped out into the big bad world. No protection; nothing is provided.

This crash into the “real world” is so sudden. Nothing that is taught on the journey to this place has prepared students for this. But surely that can change?

A deadline is dead. It doesn’t move.

There is no clear awareness of the importance of deadlines. When I was at university, we had weekly deadlines. Every Friday was critique day infront of the lecturers and fellow classmates.

If during the week there was a special student offer on beer somewhere, the majority of the class would turn up on the Friday empty handed. The lecturer would roll his eyes, classmates would snigger, and that would be that.

You can’t get away with that in business. If you miss a deadline, you have to pay the consequence.

Work is work.

I love my job. I enjoy coming to work everyday. I enjoy the banter with fellow staff members, and being able to produce quality work for clients.

But its hard work. Sometimes its long hours. It can get stressful, difficult and frustrating. Some days you just want to stay in bed and make it all go away.

But you can’t.

The rewards of succeeding; of solving a seemingly impossible problem; of being able to get a team together and work out the answer; are amazing. You can’t buy that feeling.

Students need to be aware of that. Maybe they need a project that is nearly too much work. Something that will occasionally stretch them, in their safe environment.

Maybe.

Real experience counts.

Alot of universities offer year in industry placements as part of the course. Many do this really well. I`ve found, through my own experience at uni too, that local to Cardiff, the universities don’t seem to be very proactive in helping students arrange work placements.

A year (or even a few months) as an intern in a real business will allow students to get proper, real, hands on day to day actual working-life experience. A month at a business will teach them far more than a business module in a media course.

I know it can be tricky, and there is alot of administration involved, but at the end of the day if students are keen to gain experience, the university should be helping them every step of the way.

And ofcourse, there needs to be businesses willing to take on interns. We took on our intern with no previous experience of doing it before, but 6 months into a 9 month contract he has become a valuable part of the company.

We interviewed for the position, and chose the lucky guy based on his skills, aptitude, ambition and drive. As a business, you don’t have to take on liabilities. Get the intern(s) that will help you as well as them.

Its not all doom and gloom.

Having said all this, I really do think students studying media courses with practical aspects really are passionate and have the want to get into business.

We, as professionals, need to nurture that natural hunger, and (some) businesses need to be open to discussions with universities about how to ensure their students are getting a fair outlook on what to expect once the cotton-wool runs out.

Off the back of this, I personally am arranging some speaking dates with local universities, to try to help shed some light on what “real businesses” look for from fresh recruits.

Get in touch if you’d like more info.

I work with a very skilled team of creative designers. They are adept taking on a UX-washed list of requirements in the shape of a wireframe, and applying their voodoo skills of coming up with “stuff” to make something beautiful.

But then that artistic impression of a website gets handed to my team, who’s task it is to interpret every detail of what was going on inside  the designer’s head when she put pixel to Photoshop.

And for years, that’s worked. But in a modern online world, these pictures of sites need to come to life through clever interaction, beautiful user experience, and that little “je ne sais quoi” that is now expected when actually using a site or application online.

A designer has probably got most of these little details in mind, but cannot feasibly display each and every responsive feedback element within their design files. As a front end team, we sometimes get frustrated when its not clear what happens when you transition from one field to another, so we either guess, or get out of our seat and go and ask the designer.

And that is the key bit… asking the designer.

Talking to designers about their decision process is key in being able to create a tactile piece of web design or web app. The questions asked, the answers given with explanation, the non-obvious anticipated user-interactions will all help in the overall quality of the technical build.

The question is, when should designers and developers get together and talk? At project kick off stage? During the first round of design iterations? When the first clickable prototype is being built?

Yep, you guessed it… all of the above.

The ideal is an ongoing iterative collaborative process, where regular get-togethers are arranged to iron out any kinks, clarify foggy areas, and crack on with creating a thing of beauty, brawn and brains.

Regular cross-discipline working ensures quality is maintained throughout the project lifecycle. Instead of painting a picture of a completed website, designers should be given the space to apply their skills in art direction, tone of voice, visual language and overall creativity to help the final product be the best it can.

One way of doing this is taking a much more modular approach to design and build. I wont go into the details of how that would work yet, that’s another article altogether, but in a nutshell it allows a designer to focus on forging the creative of the whole site instead of using up valuable time in Photoshop moving a pixel here and a header there to generate a completed “page”.

Its good to talk.

By sitting together, working together and actually talking to eachother, the cross disciplined team are all reading from the same page. Assumptions are kept to a minimum, and knowledge is shared across the team. Questions are answered in minutes, and not lost in a bug tracking application or in an inbox somewhere along with other “very important” emails. Its a very AGILE way of working, which in my opinion is the way true quality is built in.

Ofcourse, the whole ethos of this post is about cross discipline teams and not just designers. But in my experience the design team tends to be much more separated from the people actually building the application or website. And it can all start with tiny changes.

Get the developers, designers, UXers, testers all in a room at the start of a project. Get a big flip chart, and lots of pens. Get coffee. Spend as long as it takes to talk about the idea, ask questions, answer questions, get stuff on paper. The time spent at this stage is invaluable.

Regular check-ins, or scrums, or get-togethers, or hub-chats, whatever you call them, are key. After kickoff, get the team back in a room after a week or so (relative to the project size). Go through the flip chart notes you made last time, and iterate on those. Too often, the first kick off goes ahead, then people are too busy working on the project for further meetings. This is where mindsets need to change; these meetings ARE work.

So, on your next project, get everyone together at the start, and book in another meeting. Each meeting, do the same. Its vital the meetings are productive, so no laptops (unless code sharing or prototype demoing etc), no time wasting, just clear constructive conversations with outcomes. Sit the team together, and get them talking. Its a sure-fire way to increase accountability and responsibility, and ultimately, to increase quality.

My background has always involved the overlap of design and tech. At school, it was a passion for Design & Technology (or CDT as we called it). At uni it was Product Design. From then, it has been front end web development, bridging designs with client side interaction.

I work with a team of Front End Developers (or Client Side Designers, or Interaction Developers, or Behaviour Specialists, or whatever new buzz words sums us up.. but that’s a whole different conversation) as their manager.

My team in my eyes is brilliant. I can always, with confidence, take on a new challenge and know that the guys will either be able to do it already; take a little practice run before cracking it; or spend a few days researching and come back grinning knowing they’ve worked it out. And quality is always at an optimum.

Not too long ago, I would have been part of that process… getting my hands dirty in trying stuff, learning stuff, doing stuff.

That has changed since stepping up my management role.

I feel my team have surpassed me in the technical ability stakes. Yes, I have years of hand-honed CSS skills under my belt, and often see things in a different way to the new fly-by-the-seat-of-their-CSS-pants young guns to solve problems. But it’s the core skills that have are now seen as the norm in the role of front end that I no longer do on a daily basis where I feel I`m getting overtaken.

I try to stay aware of as much new web tech as I can, and always try to have a play to at least get to grips with the principles behind them, but it ultimately comes down to a simple matter of volume; there is only so much time available to work with new tech vs time needed to actively a manage team who are doing the work.

My team is far more experienced and skilled than me in the Coffeescripts, Backbones, Nodes, and whatever other new jiggery pokery is available as part of a toolkit of front end development. I go to them to get the professional answers on what technologies are capable of what features, on which device and how long they will take to develop. I ask my team to clarify what is possible, by when, and who is best suited to do it.

And I like it that way.

To me, my job is to ensure the front end output for the company I work for is the best it can be. I need to ensure the team we have producing the work are the best we can get. To allow that to happen, I should be hiring people with the best skills and knowledge, ninjas of front end, who will very likely be more skilled in coding than me.

As I see it, in my position, management is a niche skill. Proper management. Not just management by procedure, or checklists, but real personal “come on team, lets sort this” management. It’s much more about empowering a team of already highly skilled individuals to push to produce the highest quality they can and to constantly aspire to improve, hone, and learn new skills.

So, I’m not embarrassed the people I manage are better coders than me. On the contrary, I’m proud, because to me, that means I`m doing my job, and doing it blummin well.