Professional Reflections
NIHAL ISLAM
Industrial Designer / Campaign & Reward Development Manager at TCC Global
Make sure to have all your core skills up to scratch before graduating, whether that’s Keyshot, sketching, Arduino or whatever it is, just make sure it is at a good level because it will help you out at the start of your career, trust me. Yes, you’ll learn on the job but having that advantage in the beginning will help. Which leads me on to placements. Get experience in the real design world before graduating. Not only will it help you gain some experience but it will make you a lot more employable than others without experience.
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PRODUCT DESIGN Middlesex University Faculty of Science and Technology
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Since graduating from Middlesex University in 2016, I’ve had the pleasure of working with a few of London’s top Industrial design consultancies for a couple of years such as Curventa. I have worked with some of the world’s leading brands, helped build start-ups from small ideas into a reality and I then went in-house joining a massively funded start-up known as Zwift. In 2019 COVID hit us all and I made a big decision to go freelance and out of nowhere I became an Industrial Design Manager. Sounds a bit crazy right? Well, that’s all part of the journey.
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I’m now working as an Industrial Designer and Campaign and Rewards Development Manager for a company called TCC Global where I get to lead product ranges (known as rewards) to be sold in a loyalty campaign, helping to bring back loyalty from customer to leading retailers across the world. I’m only 6 years (including
placement year) into my career as an Industrial Designer and I’ve still got a long way to go! In order to get to where I am today, it took a lot of hard work, perseverance and grit – it wasn’t an easy journey at all. However, being at an early stage of my career I saw this as a chance to explore different paths; I have worked in-house, consultancy and freelance to really understand what I enjoy and don’t enjoy. I didn’t physically tell myself that I would now do this and that, they just came along at certain points of my career and at the time they may have not seemed ideal for me, but I took into account the wise words once given to me by Wyn (Griffiiths); to just take that chance and see what doors it opens. Sometimes it’s all about taking that leap of faith, which my 21-year-old self didn’t really get at the time but now I do! If I could summarise the BA/BSc Product Design course
