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Mapping the creative career: How design students at Universidad El Bosque turned exploration into direction
7 September 2026
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In 1Mentor by QS's first labor-market exploration pilot, Communication Design students discovered new career paths, decoded what employers want — and helped the platform chart creative roles it had never mapped.
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Full Report (16 pages)
Executive summary
In the second half of 2024, Universidad El Bosque and 1Mentor by QS ran a first-of-its-kind pilot: a structured labor-market exploration for students in Communication Design, one of Colombia's most distinctive creative programs. The goal was to turn a strong artistic education into clear professional direction. In just one month of implementation, 90% of students identified the key skills they needed, 89% found the exercise valuable to their development, and their understanding of what employers look for climbed from 60% to 80%. Along the way, students helped 1Mentor expand its own map of creative careers.
Context and challenge
El Bosque's Communication Design program is innovative and, in its field, unique in Colombia — built on a strong foundation in design and artistic creation. Yet its students shared a quiet challenge: talented and well-trained, but unsure which roles they could realistically aspire to after graduation, or which skills the market would demand of them.
Creative careers are notoriously hard to chart. Job titles shift, roles blur, and the path from a design degree to a first job is rarely linear. In the second year of its partnership with the university, 1Mentor saw an opportunity to integrate more deeply into the formative process — not as an add-on to career services, but as a hands-on exploration built into the program itself, giving students a practical, simple way to connect their profile to the real needs of the labor market.
1Mentor's value
1Mentor's contribution followed the platform's core loop — explore, uncover gaps, and build a plan — applied here to a field that had never been fully mapped.
First, students explored real career opportunities, discovering emerging roles in their field they had never considered. Then they confronted the gaps: by comparing their current skills against what employers actually ask for, they saw clearly where their profile was strong and where it needed to grow. Finally, they translated that insight into formation — a personalized professional action plan with concrete strategies for their development. The exercise turned an abstract question, “what can I do with my degree?”, into a specific, evidence-based answer.
The implementation journey
The pilot was designed to be light for faculty and practical for students. It began with internal preparation: 1Mentor's team worked with the university's DAT group to define templates of occupations and skills tailored to Communication Design. When it became clear that students weren't comfortable with advanced Excel, the team deliberately simplified those templates — a small adaptation that protected adoption.
From there, the rollout was tightly structured. After aligning with the professor, 1Mentor led a 30-minute virtual launch session with students, followed by a first deliverable — an occupations template — with a two-week window. A second session introduced the skills template, again over two weeks, before the university delivered results and 1Mentor closed the pilot with a session analyzing findings and answering questions. The whole cycle ran in about a month, plus two weeks of preparation, with the Customer Success team carrying the operational load so the exercise never burdened the teacher.
Results and impact
The pilot delivered on both sides of the table. For students, the numbers were strong: 90% identified the key skills they needed to reach their professional goals (4.5/5), 89% rated the exercise valuable and relevant to their development (8.9/10), and 84% believed 1Mentor would be central to planning their careers (4.2/5). Most tellingly, students' understanding of the skills employers seek rose from 60% to 80% — a 20-point gain in a single month.
For 1Mentor, the pilot mapped new territory. Working through real student profiles surfaced 7 new occupations in the communication-design field and 36 new job-title synonyms, expanding the platform's taxonomy and making these creative careers more visible for every future student who explores them.
In their words
The clearest signal came from the students.
“I now have a broader perspective on my career options. I know where to look and how to prepare myself.”
“It helped me define my professional interests and better structure my path.”
“I have a better understanding of what employers are looking for and how my profile fits those trends.”
Lessons and opportunities
As a first pilot, it was as instructive for 1Mentor as for the university. The Excel-based data collection proved tedious for some students, pointing to a clear opportunity to make the tooling more intuitive and interactive. Others noted that the available profiles felt too general for the most specialized creative niches — a signal to keep deepening the very taxonomy this pilot began to expand.
The university, for its part, saw something bigger: the potential to use these insights for curricular adjustments, letting real market data inform how the program itself prepares students. What began as an exploration exercise opened a conversation about the design of the degree.
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