Get the inside scoop on jobs and careers with Vault career guides. Vault Career Guide to Interior Design is your complete resource to jobs, careers, interviews and recruiting.
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Vault Career Guide to Interior Design Get the inside scoop on jobs and careers with Vault career guides. Vault Career Guide to Interior Design is your complete resource to jobs, careers, interviews and recruiting. |
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Vault Career Guide to Interior Design Get the inside scoop on exciting careers in interior design with this new Vault guide. Vault brings you the information you need about education and certification, the major design firms, and keys to success. The guide provides a breakdown of career paths, including residential and commercial design, sales and furniture design. Pages: 192 Price: 29.95  |
From more traditional designers such as Mariette Himes Gomez to Anna Nicole's Bobby Trendy, designers are fast becoming celebrities in their own right. But just as today's hottest starlet can easily become tomorrow's old news, designers are also susceptible to the public's whims. Staying on top requires determination and hard work. Being consistently published and making the "Top 100" list put out by so-called shelter magazines like Architectural Digest and House Beautiful are musts for any high-profile designer.
Magazines and television portray interior design as a glamorous career of unlimited creativity and fun. Shows like Trading Spaces and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy depict designers spending their days selecting fabrics and colors, choosing furniture and objects. Within a half hour, a space has been transformed from atrocious to magnificent, and all we see the designer do is select a few objects and explain their scheme. No time is spent explaining the gritty details: picking exactly the right elements and ensuring they fit properly and are available in the right finishes, checking that they are in stock, dealing with delays from the manufacturer and questions from installers. What really goes on behind the scenes? How is that beautiful house featured in Elle Decor or Metropolitan Home actually created? A great deal of unspectacular but essential work goes on to make a project a success. This book will provide valuable insight only an insider can reveal: the truth behind the glossy pages, a look at the clients, what skills and qualifications are necessary to succeed and whether the field is really for you.
The industry
As of November 2003, there were over 10,000 interior design firms in the U.S., employing nearly 50,000 people. Small companies, employing only one to four people, are the most prevalent, accounting for nearly 7,000 of these firms.
But the interior design industry is highly fragmented -- only 0.4 percent of all interior design companies have over 100 employees. This smaller scale makes for an atypical business environment. Compared to other professions like computing, banking or engineering, there are no conglomerates like Microsoft to work for, so most designers end up at a small to medium-size firm with fewer than 50 employees. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2002 approximately 40,670 interior designers were employed in various design related businesses. This number does not include self-employed designers; when those individuals are included, the total number increases to about 62,000. But other studies suggest numbers as high as 65,000 to 75,000, primarily because there is no nationally consistent definition of what qualifies someone to be an interior designer.
Demographics
Interior design is female-dominated, with women accounting for approximately 60-80 percent of employed professionals. These numbers fluctuate depending on whether architectural firms are included in calculations, since they tend to employ more male designers. According to the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID), 55 percent of practicing designers in the United States are between the ages of 35 and 54, with about 20 percent of designers over the age of 55 and 25 percent under age 34. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that "interior design, along with other design fields, is growing at a faster-than-average rate nationally, when compared with other occupations." From 1999 through 2002, the number of employed interior designers grew by 35 percent. Increased growth is expected to continue through the year 2010 due to demand for design services in the following specialties: office, health care and hospitality. As reported by Interior Design magazine, the Top 100 Interior Design Giants collected a total of almost $1.5 billion in fees in 2003. The highest earners were office and retail design, accounting for almost 30 percent and 13 percent respectively. Other design specialties were not as fortunate. Residential design declined almost 12 percent as did financial institutions, which decreased 22 percent.