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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%. The pilot also generated valuable insights into career pathways within the creative industries, highlighting the breadth of opportunities students were interested in exploring.
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. During the second year of the project, the university and 1Mentor explored ways to embed labor-market insights more directly into the formative process. Rather than positioning the platform as an add-on to career services, the pilot was integrated into the program itself, giving students a practical way to connect their profile to the realities of the labour 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 where students often face less clearly defined career pathways.
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 an internal preparation phase, during which occupation and skills templates were developed in collaboration with the university's DAT group and tailored to the Communication Design programme. When it became clear that students were not comfortable working with advanced Excel tools, the templates were simplified to make participation more accessible and encourage engagement.
From there, the rollout was tightly structured. After alignment with the course professor, the pilot launched with a 30-minute virtual session for 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 shared the results and the pilot concluded with a final session reviewing the findings and answering students' questions. The whole cycle ran in about a month, plus two weeks of preparation, with implementation support handling much of the operational coordination so the exercise placed minimal additional demands on teaching staff.
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.
The pilot also deepened understanding of the communication-design labour market. Through analysis of student profiles and career interests, the exercise identified 7 additional occupations and 36 job-title variations, revealing a wider range of professional pathways than many students had previously considered.
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, the exercise generated valuable lessons for future implementations. The Excel-based data collection proved tedious for some students, highlighting the importance of intuitive and accessible tools. Others noted that the available profiles felt too general for the most specialized creative niches, underscoring the diversity and complexity of career pathways within the creative industries.
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 sparked valuable discussions about how labour-market insights can inform programme development and curriculum design.
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