Content analysis of Australian design jobs to improve curriculum

This paper reports the key knowledge and skills sought for industrial design jobs in Australia. Our goal was to find out the required skills and what attributes of the jobs are highly desirable and what levels of proficiency are required for a particular job. We have collected online job advertisements from seek.com.au. In total 60 job advertisements were identified, which were later used for content analysis. Our result shows that some job titles (n = 18) were used synonymously such as industrial designer, product design engineer and mechanical engineer. In our analysis we have identified key skills for the design jobs and we have observed that in addition to domain specific skills majority of the jobs require very high proficiency in software tools for example SolidWorks or CAD. Finally, we outline the key implications of our findings for design students and educators to update their curriculum.