[Sigia-l] What happened to the good IAs

[Stew Dean]

On 20/06/07, Giovanni Fortezza <giovanni at fortezza.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I have been on the list for a while and follow conversations as much as I
> can and was wondering whether anyone else is currently having these
> problems.
>
> In the New York market there is a shortage of Junior IAs and IAs but there
> are plenty of Senior IAs. Which would suggest that there are no IAs entering
> the workforce, however that doesn't seem to be the case. The majority of the
> senior IAs I am interviewing are at best Junior and the rest are certainly
> not senior.

Same is true in London.  I used to contract before getting dislusioned
with doing contract work for marketing based agencies so used to
attend a fair few interviews. In many cases I used interviews as means
of finding out how the agency thought about information architecture
and get a feel for the kind of people they had been interviewing.

Feedback from clients and agencies told the same message - there are a
lot of people going for IA jobs that are not IAs.  I also learnt top
new media companies are still clueless about IA in many cases making
mistakes like thinking it came under planning or letting creative
directors veto IA work. Good IAs exist but tend to be busy people :)

Some more formalisation of our field is required I think but I'm not
sure how that should be done.

Stewart Dean







> That raises the issue that have seen on this list in the past, should there
> be some kind of certification or a certain number of years/projects or both
> that an IA should have under their belt in order to move up a level?
>
> I understand the issues around it i.e. who gets to decide what the criteria
> is, who will enforce it and so on. But I feel that as professionals whose
> primary objective is the development of a great experience we need to do
> this. I have some more ideas as to how to pull this off but I was curious as
> to what the rest of the community feels.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Giovanni Fortezza
>
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-- 
Stewart Dean