The sixth edition of MentorSpeak brings to the table the great minds behind the inception of AND Academy- CEO and Founder, Dr. Jitin Chadha, along with Head of Academics, Prachi Mittal. The session explores the growing demand for skilled designers and the aspects that make AND Academy unique.
With the design industry growing at an unprecedented pace, AND Academy, backed by the rich legacy of the Indian Institute of Art and Design has emerged as a key platform for upskilling in the design field. Driven by the goal of making high-quality design education accessible and affordable, the institute continues to transform lives with its industry-relevant courses that address the growing skill gap in the present employment market.
In this chapter of MentorSpeak, we engage in conversation with the individuals who not only visualized but also brought the idea of AND Academy to fruition along with their core team. Read on for a brief introduction to them:
- Dr. Jitin Chadha, CEO and Founder of AND Academy, is an edupreneur who has been contributing to the education industry for the past 14+ years. He brings with him the experience of founding ISBF and IIAD significantly, extending his commitment to the education space through AND Academy.
- Prachi Mittal, Head of Academics at AND Academy, is a veteran design educator and researcher who brings with her 20+ years of academic experience with practice spanning disciplines such as product design, social design, publication design and design management. She also holds a PG Certificate in Higher Education from Kingston University, London.
Without further ado, let’s get right to the details of the interaction now!
Contents:
- Why should someone pursue design as a career?
- Which of the best aspects of IIAD has AND utilised?
- What is your personal philosophy as a teacher?
- What sets AND Academy apart from other competitors?
- How did your prior experience influence the structure at AND Academy?
Q1. Why should someone pursue a career in design?
Prachi: There are several reasons that I can spell out, but I believe it all eventually boils down to the fact that no matter what discipline you come from, every subject requires you to bridge critical thinking with creativity. That's at the base of any work and design is a beautiful marriage between what we define as logic and non-logic.
It’s not just restricted to aesthetics. Design touches so many aspects be it anthropology, culture, psychology, technology, or even mathematics. It's a very broad range that enriches you as an individual and enriches your life. It can help you understand the world in a very different way and allow you to start appreciating the finer aspects around you.
Jitin: It seems design is perceived in our country as something people do as a hobby, and you can't make a career out of it. It couldn't be far from the truth. There are tremendous opportunities for a career in design and I think there's a lack of awareness about this. We know a lot of young people want to learn coding, data science, or machine learning, which are all great courses, and there's demand for them. But there's equal or greater demand for design graduates as well. It's just that there is a huge gap between the demand for design talent and the supply of design talent. I think more and more people need to just be made aware that design is a very remunerative career.
Today, the skill set that you need in the workplace is multifaceted. So if you're a front-end developer and you learned user experience design, your pay scale in your career trajectory is going to take a turn for the better because now you're giving a holistic solution. So not only can you write the HTML code for the front end of a website or an app or anything else you’re building, but can conceive the design for it as well.
Another thing that is very interesting about design as a career is that it has tremendous freelance opportunities. You can work at your own pace or even choose to work remotely or within a flexible work environment. So, I think one of the things we set out to do, through AND, is to create greater awareness for design as a career.
Q2. What are the best aspects of IIAD that you have derived and utilised at AND?
Prachi: At IIAD, one of the things that we are very focused on is how students learn. We believe that active learning can only take place if students are encouraged to construct and develop their thoughts and knowledge base. Therefore, our learning system at IIAD is very exploratory, which is something that we have carried forward in AND as well.
All courses that we offer in the online space are very experimental. Students are exposed to a practice-based learning model with concepts that are taught experientially and not just by listening to people talk about design. The learners are at the centre and they are the ones who have to think about and work around these concepts. This is something we’ve implemented at AND, very organically, because that's how we believe design education has to be imparted.
Q3. What is your personal philosophy as a teacher and how do you bring that into AND?
Prachi: As I mentioned before, for me the learner is always at the center of a learning process. The curriculum or the subject matter forms the next layer followed by a robust peer group. The teacher is the furthest in these layers that you build. And that is something that I hope to integrate into the process of learning across courses at AND.
In my opinion, this also allows for each learner to bloom into their own versions. A lot of times, online learning can become a very cookie-cutter approach where you templatize how design has to be practised. But why should a student enter a creative field like design if they cannot preserve or blossom in their own individuality? That's something I truly believe in as an educator and hope to encourage in AND learners.
Q4. What are the aspects that set AND Academy apart from other online courses?
Jitin: So when we were researching online about all the kinds of course offerings that already exist in the market, we noticed that the majority of the design courses primarily focused on software training, whether it's Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign. We could hardly find any courses that really taught design. As educators, we have always believed that what students need to learn is a core skill set in how to think up a design and create a concept. This is not something you learn from a Photoshop course.
At AND academy, all our courses are focused on teaching you design. Whichever course you enrol in, we will deliver them with the knowledge of the best software applications that are used in the industry as well as a holistic understanding of design
Secondly, the courses have been designed in a very interactive manner. We want to make sure that the experience of online learning is as engaging or even more engaging than that in a studio-based environment. We come from a brick-and-mortar education background and have successfully made design education very engaging, practical, and project-based. At our design school, physically, we're using the same methodology that we use virtually (at AND). The only difference is you don't have to travel to a physical location and sit down in one room. All the other aspects of delivery are the same, be it breakout rooms or projects that you're working on collaboratively. The curriculum is designed to make sure that you enjoy the two-hour sessions. And it's an interactive session, as opposed to a one-way session that you get a takeaway from.
We’ve also noticed that placements in design, in our experience over the last eight years, are facilitated through the quality of your portfolio. What hiring teams are really looking for is the scope and quality of your skill set and a portfolio is your showcase of these aspects. And, we have made sure that students come out with a really impressive portfolio when they graduate from our courses.
The third aspect is the quality of the faculty. It's the most important thing to us that you have the best talent in the country teaching you design. And this is something very unique. The fact that we are delivering our course online means we have faculty from all over the country. And with the majority of the classes taking place in the evenings, we have managed to get a lot of industry practitioners who hold senior positions in multinational companies. So the access that we have to talent and faculty to deliver design education is tremendous. That's something we couldn't have had in a brick-and-mortar setup because we couldn't have somebody from say, Bombay, Bangalore, Hyderabad, or Chennai, as our mentor.
Another one of our key differentiators at AND academy is the concept of cohort-based learning, which means that you will learn with a group of 20 or 30 like-minded learners in a cohort setting. That's really important since learning together is something that keeps you engaged with the programs. You not only learn from the mentor or the instructor who's teaching you but also from people across the country who come from diverse backgrounds and have the same passion for learning design as you do.
Q5. How did your experience with the design industry translate into AND and how did you structure it?
Prachi: My own experience as somebody who's dabbled with learning online tells me that it can sometimes feel like an isolated space, whereas learning is a social activity. We learn best with our friends, our peer group, and the people around us, and that’s exactly what we hope to recreate at AND across the courses. Whether it is graphic design, UX design, motion graphics, or interior design, we want to bring this interactive and collaborative quality to our learning experiences. This is achieved at AND through two integral pillars: the first is that of human support and the second is technology.
Technology becomes the bridge that enables human support. In traditional learning environments, you learn with an instructor and listen to their experiences. You can share your work, get feedback on your work life from the faculty, as well as collaborate and work on group tasks with your peer group.
But how do you build human support when all of us are sitting in different parts of the world? This is where technology becomes our pillar in imparting education. The first within technology is this world-class learning management system CANVAS, which is also used by some of the Ivy League colleges. With CANVAS, all your study material, class schedules, recordings of classes, assignments, and feedback, can all be accessed anytime, anywhere in one single place.
The second is the use of several collaborative workspaces which enable you to work with your peers on group tasks. These collaborative spaces have seeped into the working processes of every professional today. Design agencies and clients actively use collaborative platforms like Miro to work together and conclude projects. We have made such platforms an integral part of our delivery to ensure industry relevance. It allows students to collaborate and learn how to function on these platforms. So when they step into the industry, they are pretty much industry-ready because they’ve experienced hands-on how a design team would function in the real world.
What’s Next?
We hope this candid discussion with the founder and head of academics of AND could both answer your doubts and motivate you to upskill in design fields. At AND Academy, we currently provide various courses in Graphic Design, UX UI Design and Interior Design that are designed to suit learners of all backgrounds. For deeper details of our programs, kindly get in touch with our course advisors.
If, however, you wish to learn more about faculty or the design field in general, we highly recommend checking out Design Blog.
Note: All information and/or data from external sources is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication.
