School of Communication Arts 2.0

The Brief

The majority of advertising agencies tell us that they are generally disappointed with the quality and readiness of people leaving university with art & advertising degrees.

Although creative departments are the engine of any advertising agency, they often receive disproportionately less budget for training than other departments.

Most creative departments receive and reject hundreds of work placement applications every year, simply because they don’t have the resources to see everyone that promises potential.

The advertising industry has been calling for Creative Apprenticeships for a number of years.

The Solution

School of Communication Arts (SCA) accepts 50 students into an 18-month creative apprenticeship. 12-months of this is spent in SCA’s studio, followed by 6-months of placements.

The curriculum has been written online (by dozens of creatives from advertising, PR, media and technology companies) and is supported through a nationally accredited qualification.

Hundreds of industry creatives have signed up to be mentors at SCA. Mentors agree to donate at least one day of the year to spend time with our students in the studio.

Educationalists would describe our model of learning as being andragogical. We prefer to describe it as somewhere between The Apprentice and Britain’s Got Talent, except we want to find more winners than losers.

The students compete against each other to win real pitches for business. Their workload is relentless. By the time they graduate, we can be confident that our cohort will be ready for action.

SCA is a not-for-profit, Social Enterprise.

The Benefits

Agencies get a much better idea of who is right for their creative departments when they are able to spend some time with potential recruits in a safe, simulated environment.

Research shows that mentoring can be very rewarding in a number of ways.

For example, it has been shown that many employees are searching for meaning in their work. They often find that meaning when they spend a bit of time mentoring.

With appropriate support and training, it has also been shown that mentors make better managers.

Students clearly benefit, because they get the opportunity to learn from practitioners. They also get introduced to the culture and rhythms of agency life.

The Agencies

School of Communication Arts works with mentors from many of the UK’s top agencies including; Ogilvy, M & C Saatchi, Saatchi & Saatchi, AMV BBDO, Start Creative, McCann Erickson, BBH, Panlogic, Digital & Direct, Santo, DDB, BBDO, St Lukes, My Agency, The Red Brick Road and Kessels Kramer.

A number of agencies have generously sponsored the school as Heroes or Legends. This helps to us to provide scholarship places and to invest in our ideapreneur students’ start-ups. Heroes and Legends share ownership in the investment fund that seeds these students’ businesses.