BA (Hons) Art and Design

Enhancing employability skills

Our course seeks to respond to the rapidly evolving creative industries, to enable you to not only be ready for immediate employment, but also for future evolutions within the industries, by providing you with long-term skills and employability. Informed by professional practitioners and researchers, the course reflects pioneering practices that cross art, design, and creative technologies. The course will enable you to be imaginative, confident and convincing in taking up and even designing and shaping your future role as a creative leader and practitioner of change.

The course offers strong employability potential for students as the Digital Creative sector is the largest growth sector of the creative industries. All skills and capabilities developed on the course are highly transferable and will support you to develop a range of knowledge, skills, behaviours attributes and attitudes which will enable you to be successful not just in employment but in life. The breadth and fluidity of the course will enable you to build an awareness and development of the following transferable skills: adaptability; creativity; collaboration; problem solving; communication; listening; analytical reasoning; critical thinking; attention to detail; and, writing.

Key employability skills will also be acquired through:

• Working on live briefs with real clients in an employment context, enabling you to collaborate, communicate effectively, build social skills and develop a global perspective.

• The option of a work placement module, professional placement year, and multiple live briefs will be offered with potential employers as real partners in learning.

• A Personal Tutor will help you reflect on your employability.

• School Employability Leads, Academic Supervisors, Careers Advisors and Graduate Plus Teams will be able to provide support and advice.

PLACEMENTS

As a student on our BA Art and Design course you will be offered the choice of taking one of the ADM Faculty Modules. Each module will have a live focus whether that be working across the City collaboratively with students from across the Faculty, working within industry in work experience placements or working on live project briefs.

You will have the option to take a year-long professional work placement sandwich year to spend time directly working in industry through our BA (Hons) Art and Design with Professional Placement Year. This presents a fantastic opportunity to gain confidence, build experience and develop workplace skills before graduating through a work-based learning opportunity. If you choose this route you will be supported by the course team in researching their chosen area of work and given advice to secure a placement (or placements) that enable you to develop key employability skills in a direct, interesting and meaningful way. It provides the opportunity to spend a year completing structured work experience anywhere in the world, before returning to Birmingham School of Art for the final year of the BA Art and Design course to apply what has been learnt working in industry.

Links to Industry

The course is directly supported by Jason Bruges Studio, and founder Jason Bruges is our Visiting Professor: Design Studio Practice.

Birmingham School of Art has a wide array of links with partner organisations regionally, nationally and internationally. These partnerships will provide work experience opportunities for you, and contribute to your learning and teaching activities. Our overseas partnerships often result in opportunities for you to mix with students from different countries and gain different perspectives, as well as opportunities to undertake a period of study overseas.