Put Your Creativity to Work by Becoming a Jewellery Designer

January 12th, 2016 Career AdviceDesign Careers

As a jewellery designer, you work with beauty. You produce wearable pieces of art that people prize and give each other as gifts.

Jewellery design is a curious mix of practical and aesthetic. You’ll be working with pieces from concept to creation; drawing and sketching out your ideas, creating moulds, researching and choosing your materials, and doing the physical crafting of the piece.

What you’ll need to start

If you’re interested in jewellery design, you’ll want to have a keen eye for detail, a knack for beauty, and a passion for creation. Having good design, illustration, and crafting skills is a plus, but we’ll help you out with developing those skills with our ICI Jewellery Design course.

Jewellery making is an art form as much as a profession, and your pieces will ultimately ignite the passion of the people who buy them. A good wedding ring or necklace has to catch someone’s eye – they’ll be looking through hundreds, searching for one that calls to them specifically, and you have to supply the one that does.

A beauty-focused industry

Jewellery has something for everyone. Men and women wear it, people young and old and of all walks of life. They wear different pieces to match their lifestyle and tastes, but most everyone will have something that they put on when they want to look good (or something that they never take off!).

One of the big advantages of this industry is that it’s so malleable and subjective, and that there are so many different avenues you can go down – working with different types of jewellery but also producing lots of types with one material.

Career paths

Jewellery design covers a whole range of objects, and also feeds into other professions, working with them to create combined pieces (or, with speciality training, creating them yourself). Design includes what people usually think of when they think of jewellery – rings, necklaces, brooches, and other baubles – but also covers things like trophies, engraving, enamel work, and silverware.

Creating your secondary apparatus is an associated skill, and one that some people turn into a career path in its own right. Creating moulds and assembling jewellery are both viable career choices in their own right, as is modifying, cleaning, and repairing existing jewellery as a Bench Jeweller.

Possible specialities include:

• Engraver, working to etch designs and words on surfaces.
• Enameller, creating glass designs baked or fused onto a (usually) ceramic or metal base.
• Gemmologist, a speciality dealing with the gem inlays of jewellery, identifying and assessing jewels themselves for pieces.
• Mould-worker, creating the mould through which pieces are formed and forged.

As jewellery is a very object-oriented industry, a lot of the specialities are things that you’ll be learning to do anyway – just with more devotion to them as part of the process. When you’re going through training it’s quite common to find a material, process or type that you enjoy most. Taking that on board and continuing to create and train in that field is an easy way to segue your new-found love into a full-time career.

With additional training, jewellers can also branch into associated fields like watch-making or timepiece repair, as they fulfil similar functions. While the actual watch faces take extremely specific skills, watches are often ornate, set in precious metals or inlaid with gems, and require buckles and straps which can be supplied by a jeweller.

Lastly, remember that the profession is about inspiration as well as crafting. Going your own way as an artist, or creating practical (or impractical) works with inset designs using the skills you learn in jewellery design is always an option.

What you’ll get from us

At ICI, you’ll be going through a course designed by a combination of consultancy with the industry and our own professors. Our certificates in Jewellery Design are formulated with the prospect of fast-tracking you a position in the industry,

You’ll go through a history of the profession, the basics of design, mastery of the professional equipment, and begin developing your ideas from the drawing board into reality. After we’re done teaching you how to make the jewellery, we’ll also be covering your future career (and career paths), roads into the industry-proper, and even how to set up your own jewellery business and start selling your creations.

by Gladys Mae

Gladys Mae serves as the General Manager and Head of Student Services at the International Career Institute. Gladys holds a degree in Mass Communication - Broadcast Media from the University of San Jose-Recoletos. She joined ICI in 2010 and has over the past 12 years been instrumental in providing leadership and guidance to staff and students alike. Prior to joining ICI Gladys led a multifaceted career with key roles in the banking and business process outsourcing industries.