Interior design schools are flunking when it comes to teaching business skills, as Business by Design reports this month.

THIS MONTH:
+ Closed for Business
+ Hindrance or Help?

+ Closed for Business
There's a crisis in the classrooms at America's nearly 150 accredited interior design schools.

The schools are doing a crummy job of teaching the business side of the business.

They aren't providing adequate career training. Too many students graduate unfit and unprepared to succeed because they lack basic sales and marketing skills.

The result: many graduates flounder and fail financially.

The problem isn't what the schools teach. It's what they don't teach.

They don't offer courses -- or, at least, enough courses -- on business management, fees, contracts, customer service, communication skills, accounting, and strategic planning.

Their graduates join firms, or start their own, with little idea how to price their services, market themselves, manage their time, close sales, overcome price objections... and the list goes on.

That's not to say the schools don't offer an ample curriculum.

Catalogues are filled with courses on topics ranging from faux finishing to furniture, from textiles to technical drawing, from color to codes, from hospitality design to historic preservation.

But just try to find courses on how to sell those skills and services and products.

Good luck locating programs on the business of design.

+ Hindrance or Help?
Bottom line: many design schools hinder, rather than help their students when it comes to career development.

They dump their graduates into a highly competitive marketplace that requires the kind of sales and marketing insights they didn't get in class.

It's time for school administrators to get down to the business of teaching business.

For design schools to be relevant, they have to get real.

(For a related article:
Want a Design Career? Then Learn Design Business)