Design support for your business

When embarking on a design project, you will have to choose a person or a team to lead this work. Most common options for businesses include:

• employing a full-time designer - if you have resources and demand for such a role in your business
• hiring a design agency - as and when required for particular projects
• up-skilling an existing employee - perhaps someone with previous experience or understanding of design, or simply someone passionate about the business brand and its success

Benefits of design training for your business

There are many benefits of up-skilling and building design capabilities of your existing staff. For example:

• An existing staff member will have an understanding of how the business works, how the business sees its product/service developing, at what stage and at what pace.
• They will also have established relationships with colleagues, which can help with efficiency, productivity and teamwork. Employing an agency could mean relationships need to be built from scratch.

By training a current staff member you can also choose who is best suited to the role of in-house designer and decide on what you would like them to specialise in before sending them on design training courses, eg graphic design or web design.

Basic design courses and qualifications are available in all Northern Ireland regional colleges.

Support for learning

The Department for the Economy offers a range of training and development programmes aimed at assisting businesses in improving their workforce's skills. Find support for training your staff.