Supporting First-Year Design Students in Developing Professional Competences

Pilot Runner: LAB University of Applied Sciences (Finland)

This Open Pilot, hosted by LAB University of Applied Sciences in Lahti, Finland, supports first-year design students in the course “Developing Professional Competencies.” The pilot uses the CYANOTYPES Creative Agency Competence Framework to help young design students begin their studies with a clearer sense of their own creative abilities, values, digital awareness, financial understanding, and self-reflective capacity.

The pilot creates an upbeat and practical learning space where students can connect future-relevant competences to their own development as emerging creative professionals. Rather than treating skills development as an abstract exercise, the pilot embeds the framework directly into course activities, assignments, feedback, and reflection.

Aims of the pilot

The pilot aims to help first-year design students strengthen their skills as young creative learners and future professionals. It focuses on five CYANOTYPES competences linked to the Self cross-cutting theme:
A1 – Creative Confidence
B1 – Working with Values
C1 – Data and Digital Literacy
D1 – Financial and Economic Literacy
E1 – Self-Awareness and Empathy

The CYANOTYPES Framework gives the course a clear structure for exploring these competences and helps students recognise how personal development, creative practice, digital awareness, values, and economic understanding are connected.

Activities undertaken

The pilot was delivered through a series of monthly sessions from January to May 2025, with around 40 first-year Sustainable Design Business students participating. Each month focused on one selected competence, supported by lecture-based input, examples, individual assignments, and feedback.

Students created deliverables connected to each competence area and were guided to reflect on how these skills relate to their own creative development. The pilot therefore combined structured teaching with active experimentation, helping students move from awareness to practice.

Outcomes and early learning

The main expected outcomes are student deliverables linked to each of the five competence areas. These materials will be analysed by the LAB team to understand how the CYANOTYPES Framework works in a first-year design education setting. The pilot is also intended to inform a future article about the experience of applying the Framework in teaching.

The pilot may also create opportunities to extend the approach into second- and third-year courses at LAB University of Applied Sciences, depending on what is learned from this first implementation.

Adding value

The pilot is also helping the team understand what needs further adaptation before the approach can be scaled. Its value lies not only in the student outputs, but also in what it reveals about timing, learner readiness, teaching formats, and how the CYANOTYPES competences can be made meaningful in a specific educational context.

Possible policy recommendations

This pilot suggests that policy makers, funders, and education leaders should support small-scale, practice-based pilots as a credible way to strengthen future skills in the Cultural and Creative Industries. The LAB pilot shows how a shared competence framework can be tested inside an existing course without requiring a full curriculum redesign from the start.

Policy support could therefore focus on enabling learning organisations to embed creative agency competences into real teaching contexts, fund iterative pilot activity, recognise evidence from learner outputs and reflective practice, and connect successful pilots to wider lifelong learning or micro-credential pathways. This would help build more resilient, future-ready creative education ecosystems while avoiding a one-size-fits-all model.

Website: https://lab.fi