Sizing Up the Technical Design Position, Part II

Apparel's Technical Design Roundtable participants discuss the challenges of sharing fit information with offshore vendors and finding talented technical designers in the second part of this two-part article covering highlights from the event.

DesMarteau, Apparel: What skills are most important to be instilled in a college graduate who is preparing for a career in apparel technical design?

Janice Larsen, Product Engineering Manager, Arc'teryx: People really have to love the idea of problem solving because that's a huge part of it with all of the different skills that they're going to have to utilize. The communications skills also are so important.

Jill Simmons, Vice President of Business Development, Lectra: I know some of the university systems are trying to develop [a technical design] curriculum because one of the things they're faced with is that nobody really goes to school to try to become a technical designer. It was one of the last things that people wanted to do, and it was seen as kind of the failure route to being a designer. It's an old perception, and this is a fairly new industry and technical design is a fairly new position within the industry that has arisen in the past 15 years. Universities are having to break the mold, and they're having to remold it to make sure that people really want to embark on this as a career.

Elaine Paullus, Manager of Technical Design, Ready-to-Wear, Saks Inc.: In [my college's] pattern making classes, we had to make the patterns to fit our own body, and then we had to make a muslin, and we had to get up in front of the class and conduct a fitting.

Janet Moss, Director of Apparel Technical Services, Nike: One of the things that I would like to see of the higher education systems is more of a partnering with businesses. There are some schools out there that do a really excellent job of that. It's important to just get the professors out [in the field] for educational internships because it seems there's a lack of knowledge, even over the last 15 years, of what's actually happening out in the industry.

Paullus, Saks: That's a very good point. We have instructors that visit us from Auburn University, and they do exactly that. They come and spend the day with us, and then we actually hire their [school's] interns. So far from the internship program, we've hired three assistant technical designers who have turned out to be very good hires.

Julie Dean, Director of Technical Design, Catherines (Charming Shoppes): To a certain degree, I almost find that if you grow your own, you end up with a better employee because this is such a new career. We've really had some good luck with the younger folks coming