Graphic Designer Wanted: A Document Analysis of the Described Skill Set of Graphic Designers in Job Advertisements from the United Kingdom

IntroductionIn this paper, we address the scope and content of graphic designers’ work through an analysis of job advertisements from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK). The specific research question that we address through our study is “what is the expected skill set that employers reference in advertising for graphic design positions? ” Domain-specific knowledge about what companies expect from designers is needed to feed developments in both theory (see e.g., Dorst, 2008; Valencia, Person, & Snelders, 2013) and practice (see e.g., Conley, 2004, 2007). In general, following Horvath (2007), continuing growth of knowledge on design is important in advancing the status of design as an academic discipline as well as in differentiating the work of designers from the work performed by professionals in other fields.Based on a document (thematic and content) analysis of 1,406 job advertisements, we derive patterns in the expected skill sets employers articulate for graphic design positions. In particular, inspired by a competence-based view of skill development in education (Voorhees, 2001), we structure the requirements in the advertisements in terms of (1) what graphic designers should deliver (competence areas), (2) what graphic designers should know (knowledge and skills), and (3) what personal characteristics they should have. We assess the robustness and completeness of our findings in interviews with graphic design experts. Taking a comparative view on the work of graphic designers, we also study how the requirements in the advertisements vary at different levels of seniority (junior, middle, and senior) as well as for internal (company) and external (agency/consultancy) positions.Job advertisements represent an emergent venue for research on design. Job advertisements contain written statements about what companies seek from future employees, produced according to the needs of companies rather than those of researchers (Todd, McKeen, & Gallupe, 1995). For researchers, they serve as a source of knowledge about the labour market conditions that apply to professionals, and what criteria companies use when hiring new employees (see e.g., Carnevale, Jayasundera, & Repnikov, 2014; Kuhn, 2014; Kuhn & Mansour, 2014; Kurekova, Beblavý, Haita, & Thum, 2016). Scholars have used advertisements to study the expected skill sets for a number of professions, including information system specialists (Todd et al., 1995), librarians (Choi & Rasmussen, 2009; Gallivan, Truex, & Kvasny, 2004; Kennan, Cole, Willard, Wilson, & Marion, 2006), and webmasters (Wade & Parent, 2002). In design literature, job advertisements have to date been used to study what expectations companies have of industrial design professionals (Yang, You, & Chen, 2005) and recent industrial design graduates (Ramirez, 2012). Yet, to the best of our knowledge, no study has used job advertisements to analyse the requirements placed on graphic designers and how such requirements potentially vary for different types of designer positions.While the scope and content of the work of (industrial) designers has generated a wealth of research on design, discipline-specific research on graphic design remains limited (see e.g., Logan, 2006). This is unfortunate as organisations typically seek both complementary and overlapping contributions and outcomes from design professionals (Buchanan, 2001). An early (company) interest in design often begins as an interest in graphic design (Borja de Mozota, 2003). Further, while much research on design addresses the skill sets of designers and how companies benefit from expertise in design (see e.g., Bruce, Cooper, & Vazquez, 1999; Perks, Cooper, & Jones, 2005; Valtonen, 2005), fundamental questions about how designers enter organisations and what employers expect when recruiting professionals with design expertise have in many ways fallen outside the scope of empirical research (for noteworthy exceptions see Ramirez, 2012; Yang et. …