Designing a mentorship program for junior designers
Offcampus | March 2022
Offcampus was a 3-month design mentorship program I ran during my college. Think YC but for junior designers where they would get trained get their first jobs. This is the story of how we ran a summer batch and got +20 designers from the batch hired.
Problem
The “path” to learning design (0 — being just discovering design, 100 — being getting a design job) is unstructured and confusing for most young people out there. There are plenty of resources and mentorship platforms but for a person discovering design online, it’s still difficult to navigate and find the right resources and the right people to get the job done.
Users
We are talking about “high intent” folks who are really interested to learn design. These folks have a fair idea about design thinking depending on how much they tried exploring the field by themselves. They have done a project or two but need a helping hand(s) to get their first stint.
Goal
The goal is to design a cheap and effective process to allow people interested in design to learn, upskill and get to their first design job.
Problem break-down
We began by solving the problem in two parts:
Designing such a service that produces good quality designers
Communicating about the service we are building to different users
Before we designed the Offcampus Program, we wanted to understand-
Who all will be a part of the program?
The designers coming in — how much design knowledge will they already have? Do we take anyone who wants to learn design or should there be some checks we put?
How could designers who are in the industry be of help?
What do Recruiters look for when they are hiring designers? What problems could our program solve for them?
People involved in the system
Batch Members are designers recruited into the program.
Design Coaches are like seniors at Offcampus. They mentor the batch members and facilitate all the sessions
The industry network includes alumni and other designers who occasionally visit to interact with the batch
Recruiters are people hiring from Offcampus.
We wanted to understand how much (and for how long) should our service support the designers it’ll serve. To do this we tried to define a designer’s journey — understanding the part where designers need mentorship.
Based on how long they have been exposed to design and how much they have mastered in terms of skill, we can define designers into 4 categories. Newcomers, adopters, leaders, and Grandmasters.
We decided to focus on Adopters. These are folks who have adopted Design thinking. They know how to follow the steps in the design process but don’t know completely yet — the ways in which design thinking can be applied in real life.
Adopters are usually at the phase when they have done one or two case studies themselves. They require hands-on practice and coaching the most at this point.
Leaders and Grandmasters are often working in the industry and hence don’t need much outside help — their learning is taken care of by the workplace itself. They can work as Design Coaches in the program.
It’s also important to know that we wanted folks with really high intent. People who are actually self-learners. Having a case study done (however good or bad) is a good check of intent.
Processes involved in the system
Offcampus runs as a 3-month design program. It occurs twice a year — Once in Summer from February to April, second in Winter from September to November. We designed a process to identify and recruit the kind of users who’d be fit for the program.
Recruitment
Designers apply to the program through the application form. The application form was designed keeping in mind that we wanted to see the following in our users —
Are they observant? Are they able to notice design problems around them? Are they able to see what products are solving these problems well?
Are they intentful? Do they actually care about spending enough time on these questions like “why do they like Design?”, Do they care enough to articulate it well to people? Have they tried solving a problem by themselves?
Designers shortlisted through the applications get to Demo round — which is about presenting their design work to us over a 45 min call.
(We occasionally also pick a quick whiteboarding problem to solve in case the project isn’t enough to help our judgment).
Airtable interface to help us manage applications - send interview invites and emails.
Mentorship
Designing the mentorship process happened in stages and involved a lot of testing. We ran a small batch in Winter 2021. The goal was to figure out-
What sort of interactions with the coach are needed?
How long would it take for a person to get ready for hiring?
What is the self-learning process exactly?
With the first batch, we did a daily 10 pm call to check in on the projects they were working on — which would often result in a good problem-solving discussion. Given we still had time on our schedule we used to be open to having 1:1 calls with them anytime during the day.
Learning by working with peers helps a lot more than just learning from a design mentor.
We realized how effective group discussions are. Every discussion completed the feedback loop for self-learning —
Looking at peers projects (consume some design content)
Put something into practice (present your feedback and ideas)
Arrive at the right conclusion (agreeing to the best design solution by comparing and getting feedback from the design coach)
This supported our observation from one of the models we had been studying to build this. Design Studio is a campus group for people interested in design. The reason why Studio was able to produce good designers was that it followed a very hands-on approach. This approach involved doing projects together where you get to guide juniors, execute the project and get feedback from seniors.
Later upon kicking off the Summer 2022 Batch, we followed the same model as the previous batch for the interactions. Since we had about 30 designers this time, we divided them into groups of 5–6.
Another interesting model we had been analyzing during the time was Y Combinator. YC runs its 3-month long program twice a year where it brings founders together and help them grow their startups. While they also provide seed funding, YC’s primary proposition is the program where founders most benefit.
It involves a lot of sessions and interactions — with other founders, with YC alums, with Partners and investors. Their design of the program’s interactions was similar except it worked for them because founders are pretty high intentful users themselves.
Our users were different. They were intentful enough to show up and do their work diligently — but they weren’t so much that they would manage projects and organize the 1:1s or group meetings themselves.
They required a little more hand-holding in the processes. Also, coach meets would usually end up consuming the entire time just catching up with each designer leaving little time to do some whiteboarding or any other learning activity.
We later decided to change the sessions according to an agenda so that interactions involving the coach would be more productive. For catching up we just used the Open hours slots.
The new interactions included:
Demo Day: Involves one person presenting their work and the rest of the designers discussing and asking questions.
Critique Session: Sessions where we pick up products and see how well they solve a problem.
Learning Hour: Reading/watching design content together and bounce ideas on the topic.
Design Jam: Design Jam is a space for designers to practice short whiteboarding problems.
UI Jam: UI Jams are similar to Design Jam sessions, except we focus more on improving our craft.
Guest Talk (OffRecord) Guest talks happen over the weekend. We invite people from our Alumni Network to speak with the ongoing batch.
Open Hours are half-hour slots available every day. Apart from other sessions, these slots can be booked whenever designers want help. Design Coaches are available during these slots to give designers feedback.
Props Involved in Mentorship
The handbook consists of all the resources and guides that can help a designer at Offcampus.
Guides help designers to understand how sessions and open hours work. Resouces include a repository of problems, case studies from the batch, links off the internet we find useful and recordings from the guest talks. The handbook also includes the team directory of all the people associated with Offcampus.
Placements
Once a designer is ready to get placed we help them get hired at one of the companies we onboard.
Props involved in Placements
Profiles’ Deck: Includes all the profiles from our batches with their availability, portfolio and their applications.
Hiring Policy: Includes terms discussing financials if a successful hire is made.
To understand problems in the hiring space, we first did a soft launch as a design hiring platform for recuriters.
Getting a load of applications, shortlisting, and finding good talent was hard specifically for established startups.
For smaller startups, not having an established brand created a problem — as they usually looked for people who could join quickly as possible
We scoped our first users to early-stage startups —
For them, getting profiles through referrals was a much convinient way to hire.
A lot of them didn’t have structured design hiring process, or specific skill requirments either. This gave us some room to explore the shortlisting process for them.
To get initial traction of designers, we hosted a Hiring Challenge. The goal was to figure out if we could solve the shortlisting process for recruiters by removing the need for a design task altogether.
We learnt that perhaps it is hard to solve the hiring process by hiring challenges alone, because —
They start to see us as another hiring agency that way, solving discoverability of profiles isn’t just enough.
The profiles we got needed some help as well. That’s where the mentorship program can fit in.
Designing the front-stage: Website, social media & other artefacts
We’ve been designing the website keeping in mind of what people understand Offcampus does. We wanted to make sure that users understand-
Offcampus is different from a cohort, or an online community. It’s not as loose as the latter or as strict as the former.
What really happens in the program? What would I get out of it if I want to join?
For recruiters, we wanted to make sure they see us not as some hiring agency, but a trusted source of good designers.
Some explorations for the website design
Branding & creatives
Doodle language and guest talk posts for social media
Conclusion
The program ran for its 3-month duration, during which we organized 4 guest talks, got 10 startups onboarded, and about 20 designers hired as interns and full-time.
Few more learning from the program and things to experiment over the next batch :
Out of the sessions, it was mostly whiteboarding exercises (Design Jams) that were most fruitful. We could focus more sessions on problem-solving only and set up sessions like learning hours only when needed.
Shaping the Projects at Offcampus can be done better. In a way such that designers are 1. solving better problems 2. executing them efficiently.
The latter can be done by creating a project blueprint so that designers don’t have to worry about managing things.
The former can be done by finding a problem they themselves notice. (Auditing existing products and apps could be one way of finding such problems)
We would be working on creating a Learn section on the Offcampus website which could contain a problem board and resources to help newcomers learn to design and apply to us with a project.
Learnings
Observing your users play with your product gets you more insights than interviewing them ever does. In our case we were pretty lucky to see how designers responded to the arrangement of interactions, the feedback they were getting and simply whether they were excited about learning design here or not.
Communicating about your product to people is hard and another design problem of its own. It took us a lot of iteration over our pitch, email messages, website and social media to make sure people understand what Offcampus is and the value it provides.
Using Systems thinking is an effective tool that helps you zoom in and zoom out and understand problems in different areas of your product. Anytime the overall story sounded complicated, we’d look into finding what the bug is and see how it could be fixed.
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