[Closed] STW Junior Designer job £15.6k- did I read that right?

its also a starting salary though ....

But didn't result in you learning that median is an average

Sigh.

I'm not disputing that, but people are under the impression that the average salary per person is £29k but the report doesn't say that.

a degree in engineering, a post graduate degree in statistics and research methods and currently holding a role as the head of pricing for Europe, the Middle East and Asia for the 4th largest private health insurer in the world

Does that mean you're business core? 🙂

Does that mean you're business core?

more like business c0ck

Someone's got to be 🙂

That's quite alot of skills for £15.5k!!

Welcome to he modern jobs market. Graphics especially. It used to specialist areas. Now every employer wants the lot.

A really high conceptual level of Design for print - typography, magazine layout - (with all associated repro knowledge of course), and knowledge of EVERY software package to a very high degree. Then web design too, including basic level programming, Flash animation, video production, etc etc

If you don't tick all these boxes, you're ****ed!

However, then going on to ask for cocoa, javascript and php! Are you serious? for £15.5k?!

Yes, Imagine they are serious. Sounds fine to me. They are listing desirable skills there so that a potential applicant can decide whether it's the sort of post that would suite them.
Plus they are asking for 'experience of javascript' rather than 'an experienced javascript programmer' which are somewhat different things!

£15k sounds like a fair sum for a junior role in a tiny company in the North. Especially one where the subject is vaguely interesting and there'll be lots of opportunities to expand your experience. Small firms offer steep learning curves.

Fact is, anybody in the creative professions in the UK has to accept that there are thousands of equally skilled, hungry young grads out there who'll do your job for less. If you can't handle that competition, you should probably go and become a tube driver or binman. It's supply and demand. You get better pay by building your contacts and your skills, going beyond the call of duty etc. if this job is like my first job (19k in London), you'll do exactly that. And I'm sure junior doctors have a tougher time.

£25K for cutting hair 3 days a week.

I'm in the wrong job

lets turn it round a minute, would you spend 1.5k on bike that'll do a bit of everything from a unknown manufacturer, in a marketplace awash with similar or better spec'd kit from companies with a longer trading history for less money?

Any item or person is only worth what the market place will pay at at that time, if it doesn't sell or you can't get a job because of unrealistic wage expectations that your problem not the industries

binners - yeh I know, I just think that any opportunity should be encouraged, you never know what it leads too. I'm not driven by money, I would say most designers aren't, I was just pointing out that salaries have the potential to be pretty high.

Plus they are asking for 'experience of javascript' rather than 'an experienced javascript programmer' which are somewhat different things!

True, however this comes across as a 'jack of all trades, master of none' approach... I see plenty of job ads were they list dozens of required languages, applications and skills required because normally the employer has no idea what that job really entails, so they list them all as a 'catch all'.

In this instance how is someone who's into design (and probably going to have just spent 3 years at uni) going to have experience to a usable level in cocoa/Xcode? And why request it? Are they going to be getting this junior to knock up a couple of iPhone apps, while maintaining their server side code, designing and building a new front end to the site 😀

Rewski - I agree with you. I said in one of my first posts that Junior Designer can be Art Director in a relatively short timescale indeed. It did for me. Though without the huge salery 🙁 There's certainly potential. But like you said, if you were after money, you wouldn't become a designer. Its a bloody great job though. I love it! Still! 😀

Seems entirely fair to me. One of my friends took on a recent design grad for less money and what's likely to be less interesting work. He himself wasn't paid all that much for his first job (working for the original Singletrack designers) but got experience (and biking freebies) out of it so he now runs his own company and seems to be doing ok.

Its a bloody great job though. I love it! Still!

CBA reading all that, spesct I've probbly read it all in some form or another, but why is it that people seem to automatically expect graduates to earn loads more than everyone else, instantly after leaving uni?

S'all that Class thing, in't it; a degree once marked you out as a member of an elite. Now, there's so many other people out there as equally qualified as yourself, that competition for jobs is far higher, and wages subsequently significantly lower.

Graphic design is one of those industries which are little more than a self-perpetuating bullshit machine. Their 'importance' in society is overshadowed by the greed of many of those who work in it. Oh look, the bubble has burst, suddenly Graphic designers aren't as 'important' any more, and people don't want to spend as much money on stuff. Maybe they've just woken up and seen the Emperor is in fact naked.

There's some incredible talent out there in the world of Design, and there's an awful lot of 'let's follow the trends and just make up some crap we can fool people into thinking is cool'.

The Lympic Branding is a perfect example of this. It's rubbish, and quite frankly cooduv bin thought up by an idiot with absolutely no talent for actual design whatsoever. Actually, it probably was, let's be honest.

Graphic Design is one of those ultimately superfluous industries that will always be at the mercy of the market; recession equals less money to spend on colouring things in. 'We'll just stick with the current branding, if it ain't broke...'

Don't get me wrong, I've loved my time dabbling in the world of Graphic design, and I love being immersed in such a creative, fun world. But I'm bored with it now, and there's no money in it for someone like me right now, so I've moved into product design and manufacture. 😀 It's much easier to sell a tangible thing, than an idea.

But we need people to come up with ideas, or we end up stagnating.

Sounds like a reasonable starting salary to me. If I lived up that way, it's something I'd certainly be inertested in, if I were a fresh young graduate. Considering ST is a relatively small circulation special inertest mayg, I think it's pretty decent tbh. You could live ok up there on that, speshly if yer young and not settled down with mortgage etc. I doubt it would be anywhere near as demanding and hectic as woking for a London-based company, where you'd get paid barely anything more at that level, and have much higher living costs.

It"s a job, with a salary which for many teens and grads is a rare thing. I doubt they'll struggle to fill it.

If it's tabular data, then use a table - we're not saying they're bad to use. Just wrong to use to layout a page design.

Great, thanks (and thanks to all the other posters too) - I have some tabular data I need to present as part of a webpage (14 rows x 12 columns) - it's currently done using a HTML table but I can't help feeling there is a more elegant solution out there 🙂

it's currently done using a HTML table but I can't help feeling there is a more elegant solution out there

Nope - it's semantically correct.

Unless things change considerably in the next 6-7 years I will be actively discouraging my daughter to go to Uni, unless of course she really wants to. Both me and Mrs STR have our own businesses, left school at 16 and seem to be doing ok.

I find this kind of attitude quite depressing. You have no idea of what a university education can actually give a person, so why be so opposed to the idea for someone else?

Why do so many people think that degree = money, or not, as the case may be? Why's it always about money? Is that the one and only thing that matters in your life?

Education is about exercising and expaynding the mind, allowing the brain to develop, and the person to be able to have more choices in life than they otherwise wooduv done.

STR; what happens if you or your wife (or even both, God forbid), suddenly lose the ability to do your jobs, through injury or illness? What are your fall-back options?

A university education should never be seen as a route to wealth, but as the key to unlock many more doors than you may have been able to otherwise.

people are under the impression that the average salary per person is £29k but the report doesn't say that.

Actually, yes it does.

The irony being that it appears you're complaining about people not using the correct precise terms...

Why do so many people think that degree = money, or not, as the case may be? Why's it always about money? Is that the one and only thing that matters in your life?
Education is about exercising and expaynding the mind, allowing the brain to develop, and the person to be able to have more choices in life than they otherwise wooduv done.

I think it's about how much is costs to attend university and the quality you receive from it. Uni isn't the only place for education, if a person wants to learn, they can do it anywhere - from a laptop, the other side of the world.

If I was at the stage again of deciding to go to uni or not - in the current climate, and how much it costs, I don't think I'd bother. I think I'd look at getting involved in volunteer work - or trying to find a mentor, and being self taught.

Having a degree will go back to the old days - originally a degree indicated some level of intelligence, as uni's tended to only accept bright students. Now, they accept almost anyone.

So the difference is going to be, not if you're smart enough to have a degree, but if you're rich enough, or have sufficiently run up enough debt.

Uni isn't the only place for education

True, but it's a bloody good one though, and I find it quite sad that someone who has no personal experience of it would be actively opposed to their own child going.

Having bin myself, if I were faced with the financial impact of going to uni now, I'd still do it. In a flash. Cos you simply can't put a price on that experience.

The irony being that it appears you're complaining about people not using the correct precise terms...

I am a terrible pedant. From my engineering background, I get very annoyed when people talk about how much they weigh, though I stop short of telling them they are talking about mass rather than weight.

The report really is misleading. It refers to the median twice as being £29k, then the average as £29k.

I'd have whoever created the report publicly flogged.

I am a terrible pedant.

So why do you keep using the term "average" instead of mean? (clearly my point wasn't explicit enough for you)

I'd have whoever created the report publicly flogged.

Along with anybody with a post-grad degree in stats who continually uses the term "average" instead of mean?

glitchy bump

Why is a degree required? I can't believe people will put themselves through uni for 3/4/5 years and then take that salary - it's derisory.

The most shocking part is that it's part funded by the EU! I dread to think what it'd be without their contribution.

PS. The median is as valid an average as the mean (or the mode for that matter). It is also the average the ONS use when quoting salaries as it's less skewed by banks. http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/nov/12/pay-salaries-survey-ashe-ons

I dread to think what it'd be without their contribution.

Non-existent presumably.

Why is a degree required? I can't believe people will put themselves through uni for 3/4/5 years and then take that salary - it's derisory.

Sweet Jesus of Nazareth... 🙄

I went to uniservity to get an [i]education[/i], not simply to get a job paying £Xthousands of pounds a year.

I got what I went for, and would do it again in a heartbeat, even if I had to pay loads for doing so.

The experience gained from being in an environment with so many talented and intelligent people around you all the time, sharing ideas, learning new stuffs, cannot be commodified or quantified.

As for 'they take anyone these days'; well, apart from me, the uni I went to din't, they had very high standards indeed. Which is why so many foreign students were happy to pay thousands and thousands of pounds to go there. I'm well chuffed to have gone to such a wonderful place.

Uni isn't the only place for education

True, but it's a bloody good one though, and I find it quite sad that someone who has no personal experience of it would be actively opposed to their own child going.

And those of us who worked in engineering and got city and guilds and apprenticesghip indenturesthen and qualiifed as a craftsmen think differently.

Sadly nowadays just saying youre going to some technical college that is now rebranded as a uni, and geting some weird degree in a made up subject that you could study at night school or part time with a gulllable employer paying for the course is seen as great and good for the masses.

Then when you go to an employer with your bit of paper saying youve been book learning for 3 years reading about and writing about some weird subject, and he politely points out you dont have the relevant experience, or personality, or even relevat paper qualifications to do the job.

Welcome to the real world.

...actually, it's even more concerning that somebody with a post-grad degree in stats trys to shoot down people's shock that the "average" starting salary is £29k by pointing out that £29k is the median, when that actually means the average is even higher (and median is the correct average to use for salaries as it avoids the distortion created by a few earning silly amounts).

Why offer more than you need to get the right candidate? Only once the person is working for you do you find out if they're right for the job and if you see them as adding significant value then you can reward that by increasing their salary or paying bonuses. Start too high and where are the affordable carrots?!

And those of us who worked in engineering and got city and guilds and apprenticesghip indenturesthen and qualiifed as a craftsmen think differently.

Think differently to what, that education is actually a Good Idea?

Don't get what you're on about. Please explain.

Jeez, really?

Yep. There are a lot of lawyers who aren't earning megabucks.

And, of those that are earning piles of cash, there are (relatively) very few of them.

Elfin, peple who work in engineering think all this book learning, and interpretations and essay writing is just a load of words.

In engineering you buld something, and it must work, it cant be your interpretation of it may work, same with science you need to examine why it works or doesnt.

Yep. There are a lot of lawyers who aren't earning megabucks.

I went to uniservity to get an education, not simply to get a job paying £Xthousands of pounds a year.

I presume you would think differently if you were paying £9000 a year? The 5 year MEng degree I took would have resulted in an astounding £45k debt! Just another way that those over 40 have made their children pay for their lifestyle.

Leaving that aside, I agree that I went to uni (paying 'only' £1200 a year) to get more than just an engineering education (ooo err) but if I were doing it again I would be thinking very very carefully about my job prospects at the end of it.

Elfin, peple who work in engineering think all this book learning, and interpretations and essay writing is just a load of words.

Ah, like my neighbour who calls himself an 'engineer', but who has little more than a rudimentary grasp of engineering principles, mathematics, physics and geometry.

He's good at welding bits of metal together, making the odd raised bed out of old scaffold boards, but needed someone else to work out the angles for the corner brackets they had to have made.

Oh, and who said 'no problem, I can just weld that up for you', when my Dynatech frame came apart. I tried to explain that it was a titanium tube into a cromoly lug, but he simply said 'So? It's still steel, innit?' 🙄

And then there's people like my uncle who's worked for NASA, the ESA amongst other major organisations, who's had to read a shed load of books in order to do his job....

Engineer should be a protected term. I.e. you're not an engineer unless you have at least a degree in the subject and an affiliation to a professional organisation.

Ah, like my neighbour who calls himself an 'engineer', but who has little more than a rudimentary grasp of engineering principles, mathematics, physics and geometry

A handy neighbour to have then.:-)

Engineer should be a protected term. I.e. you're not an engineer unless you have at least a degree in the subject and an affiliation to a professional organisation.

don simon- ex sales engineer.
[img] http://www.smileys4me.com/getsmiley.php?show=1863 [/img]

Not really; he's got me to make him a cabinet, cos he 'cant get his head round all the numbers and stuff'.

Not an engineer then. He's a technician - nothing wrong with that either.

an affiliation to a professional organisation