Career Prospects After Completing A Furniture Designing Course

For most people, the house they live in is more than just a place. There are tons of emotions associated with it. Indeed, it is with your family and other near and dear ones that you spend your time with at home. This is associated with a certain amount of comfort. Indeed, for most of us, we are at our happiest when we are living in the comfort of our homes.

Now, apart from the comfort factor, home is often a matter of identity for most of us. People tend to judge us by the house that we live in. Due to this very reason, all of us are overtly conscious about keeping the house presentable all the time.

In fact, in order to establish our stand and make sure that the interiors of our house stand tall, we often end up taking multiple precautionary measures. Now talking about the interior of the house, the most important component here is the furniture.

The furniture can be antique, modern or contemporary. In each type, there are hundreds of subtypes based on the type of furniture, the materials that went into the manufacture of the furniture and a lot more. Because of the sheer number of options that are available, arriving at a definite conclusion with respect to this is no child's play.

That is where the role of professional furniture designers comes into the picture. This article talks about the career options that are available in this field and how you can pursue a successful career here.

• Educational Qualifications

There are two career paths that you can take up in order to become a furniture designer. The first path would be by completing your graduation in any field and then opting for a diploma in the field of furniture design. The same can be taken as a classroom course or online.

The nature of the postgraduate diploma course may either be part-time or full-time. The second career path would be completing your graduation in a specialised field of study that includes papers related to furniture design as electives. This would include fields like architectural technology, industrial design or interior design.

You can also go for a BE degree in the field of design engineering. In either of the cases, you will be eligible to pursue a career as a furniture designer.

• Skill Set Required

In the world of furniture designing, the skill set that you possess is given higher weightage over formal degrees. One must have a very good sketching ability with a knack for developing patterns. The space plan layouts of apartments must be easily understood by these people.

These days most of it is carried out on computers and thus basic computing skills (including knowledge of all office products) are also an important aspect of the job of a furniture designer. Thus, along with having very good knowledge of isometric drawings, one must also be well versed in the use of 3 D design software like AutoCAD.

Most furniture designers have to work in tight schedules and you train yourself to be deadline driven if you want to shine in this profession. Other than this, you should have a natural flair for solving complex design-related problems.

• Salary

This is a creative field and the amount of money that you will make will depend on how good you are at your job. The type of material that you specialise in and the budget of your prospective clients will also have a major say here. For people who choose to be employees, the average starting salary will be somewhere close to INR 19,000 per month.

However, most furniture designers choose to set up their own business in which case the amount of money that they make will depend on the amount of work that you take up, the number of hours that you put into it, your popularity amongst the public and the geographic location that you are operating from.

This is one field where networking is a very important factor. As you build better relations and professionally bond with your clients, you end up getting more projects which clearly means more money.

• Being Recruited

There are a number of places where a furniture designer can choose to work in. A number of top construction firms are focusing on interior designing with appropriate furniture as well. Most of these firms (L&T Construction, Brigade Group, Embassy Builders, DLF and Aditya Birla Group being the most prominent names here) hire students straight out of campus for these job roles.

Other than that, these days smart furniture is coming up. This is due to the cumulative efforts of furniture designers and automation experts. Trained furniture designers can also choose to work with a number of automation start-ups. Most of these start-ups are based in the cities of Gurgaon, Bangalore or Chennai.

One may also choose to work with some interior designing firms and design furniture as per the requirements specified by the client.

• Setting Up Business

For those who want to be their own boss, there is an immense scope for setting up your own business after having completed a degree in furniture design. You can set up your own consultancy and either function as an individual or have people employed under you.

In either case, you can directly work with other interior designing or construction firms and offer them your services. With the digital world becoming all the way more popular, you and earn a major chunk of your business from your website itself.

By setting up your own business, you get to choose which type of material you want to work upon and thereby improvise on things and come up with your own collection. By being self-employed, you have the complete authority to choose whom you want to work with and how much work you want to do.