Quality assessment of industrial design curriculum : discovering employability attributes from job advertisements

This paper reports the key knowledge and skills sought for industrial design jobs in Australia. The aim is to find out the required levels of skills that are wanted by prospective employers for industrial design jobs. Job advertisements were collected from the Australian popular job site seek.com.au. A total of 109 job advertisements were identified, which were later used for content analysis. The most frequent job titles were "industrial designer" (n = 25), "industrial design engineer" (n = 17), "product design engineer" (n = 8) and "product designer" (n = 5). Several key skills for the design jobs were identified and observed that in addition to domain-specific skills, majority of the jobs required very high proficiency in software tools, for example SolidWorks or CAD. Finally, key implications of the findings for design students and educators are described.