How Should Art Schools Teach Career Skills? (Including English?)

It’s tough as a graduate getting breaks. It can be just as tough finding a remunerative place that suits you, and making the transition into it.

But I strongly feel an art school education that teaches narrow, specific employment skills is off track.

Employment changes. Why waste precious studio time on something that could be irrelevant tomorrow?

Post–art school careers are diverse — which ones will you prepare for? Every “employment module” is a reduction in the time you get making. A reduction in the time you get learning other artists’ work.

A job is lucky to get your degree and the skills you walk through the door with. They can train you up for the exact role they need.

Your time at art school is where you build your work — and that process naturally pulls you in certain directions. That’s how you discover what you might want your working life to look like.

So the real question isn’t what art schools should teach, but how they should prepare graduates for life after art school — without diverting them from their principal activity.

What’s Done Well (and What’s Missing)

Art schools already do some things brilliantly. Students are divided by discipline: the software competency needed in graphic design is different from product design. Film students learn to work in teams, painters learn techniques to discover answers within themselves.

But students are often left without the tools to reflect: What did I like about this? What felt wrong for me? What do I need that isn’t in this role? Coaching techniques like these are rarely embedded — yet they are essential, because reflection becomes a habit that keeps you on track throughout your career.

And while art schools do give students exposure to experts and visiting lecturers, what’s missing is the chance to practise communicating their worth — not by presenting their artwork (that’s not for industry to decide), but in situations they are required to articulate the broader skills their degree has given them.

Why Narrow Employment Training Doesn’t Work

Building your work naturally (without career-based interventions) pulls you in some directions over others. That’s HOW you discover what you might want your working life to look like.

Going in too early with career training interrupts this flow, making it hard (probably impossible) to ever reconnect with those tiny new shoots that could have turned into strong paths/directions.

When schools bolt on career training as a separate entity,  they not only reduce studio time but risk investing in the wrong skills.

Graduates don’t all go into the same industries. Employment landscapes shift.

And those little shoots of curiosity get trampled in the process. 

What’s actually needed is resilience: the ability to weather change, adapt, and stay connected to creative practice even when life throws obstacles.

The solution is inspiration

Know Your Worth

A job is lucky to get your degree and the skills you walk through the door with.

They can train you up for the exact role they need.

But YOU need to be able to communicate what you bring to the role.

Art schools shouldn’t waste time teaching narrow job skills — they should teach strong communication skills through real work situations (and develop the self-awareness to combine them).

Inspiration is the solution to weaving career skills into an undergraduate’s path.

How Career Skills Could Be Taught

The solution is not abstract lectures but live encounters, conversations, and collaborations that inspire.

It is the art school’s job to put rich opportunities in the student’s path — to bring in diverse voices, projects, and experiences. But equally, it is their job to teach students how to filter: how to notice what inspires them, what frustrates them, what to carry forward, and what to leave behind.

That’s how students learn not just skills, but discernment — a practice that will serve them for their whole careers.

Take our model of Side Step Workshops: short charettes where students step outside their discipline to tackle real-world problems with experts.

• A medical doctor guides a team through the complexities of tackling obesity.

• A disability charity runs a workshop on safer urban spaces.

• An independent farm explores new markets for their dairy products.

Each project has three stages:

• Understanding the problem.

• Collaboration with experts and artists (architect, designer, filmmaker, maker).

• Final presentation.

A language coach supports each group throughout — not by giving answers, but by offering tips on how to express ideas clearly in English as the project unfolds. Students manage teamwork, divide tasks, negotiate meaning, and present outcomes in English.

This isn’t about producing polished solutions. It’s about practising the processes of collaboration, reflection, and communication that graduates will rely on for life.

Why English Belongs in This

Inspiration doesn’t stop at national borders. The creative industries are international, and English is often the working language.

By weaving English into projects — through critiques, teamwork, and presentations — students learn the language in the most natural way: in the act of doing, not in a classroom detached from their practice.

This is English as a tool for real-world collaboration, not an extra burden.

“Art Schools Should Teach X”

Reflection and Resilience

Experience alone isn’t enough. Students need structured reflection to make sense of it. That’s why every Side Step Workshop includes a coaching component, asking:

• What worked?

• What was frustrating?

• How have you changed through this collaboration?

• What strengths and weaknesses did you notice?

These are the habits that keep creative professionals adapting, learning, and growing long after graduation.

If the success of an art school is not just the degree show, but the percentage of graduates in creative jobs or successful maker practices three+ years after graduating, then the real challenge is clear:

How should art schools teach career skills without pulling students away from their principal activity?

Not with narrow, time-out employment training.

But with live encounters, conversations, and inspiration — woven directly into creative practice.

And if it’s happening anyway, it may as well be happening with an English component too.

Inspiration is the solution to weaving career skills into an undergraduate’s path.

Our Part in This

English training could also teach ‘soft’ workplace skills, like collaboration and communication through workshops, visiting guest lectures, coordinated work experience, group projects (like publishing a book, presenting an exhibition).

Rather than having dedicated English ‘classes’ with the whole year group (of mixed levels) in English tuition with a high-school model, international art schools can increase these forms of work experience happening in English, as part of a school-wide English strategy.

At True Voice English, we advise art schools on creating a school-side English strategy that moves this vital career skill from being taught in a silo (an English classroom) to being part of the real-world workplace encounters undergraduates have.

We also help individual artists get their English career ready through our sketchbook English course.