French Designer Laure Navarro Wins the 2017 Gymnasium Excellence in Online Learning Award

Aquent Gymnasium is pleased to award French product designer Laure Navarro with the first-ever Gymnasium Talent Award for Excellence in Online Learning. This award was given as part of the 2017 Aquent Talent Awards which recognizes excellence in design, UX, content, motion design, illustration from creative professionals across Europe.

Chosen from amongst many impressive nominees who exemplified the qualities of an engaged learner, Laure demonstrated her online learning prowess with the completion and certification of three Gymnasium courses, Responsive Web Design, UX Fundamentals, and Information Design & Data Visualization; the quality of her project work; and, ultimately, her new job as a product designer.

“Laure’s work was especially impressive. Her responsive portfolio website, Minus28.com, demonstrates her knowledge of all that she has learned and her blog chronicles her learning for others,” said Jeremy Osborn, Academic Director at Gymnasium.

In addition to a trophy presented to Laure at the Aquent Awards Party in Paris on March 9th, she also received the Web Standards Collection from ABookApart.com as her prize. Jeremy’s interview with Laure follows.

Jeremy Osborn: What motivated you to register with Gymnasium?

Laure Navarro: I started to use Gymnasium more than a year ago. I was just finishing a course in Industrial Design at the Umeå Institute of Design (Sweden) that I took after a degree in Engineering and while looking for a job, I decided to keep following courses online to widen my vision of design. I had some basic knowledge in UX but wanted to learn more and that’s how I ended up on Gymnasium.

I’m glad I found courses like Gymnasium’s ones and hope they will be helpful for many people like it was for me.

JO: What were your education goals?

LN: My goal was to get better in this field and rapidly. I thought that learning the basics of web design and coding would go great with UX.

JO: What was your experience with our courses? Did they help you get a job?

LN: I really enjoyed the way each course is made, with short videos, quizzes and some homework. It’s really easy to follow and you can go at your own pace.

The courses actually pushed me to create a website from scratch: minus28.com. I could add to my cv some lines and actually got a first job interview for a Product/UX design position, unfortunately they didn’t pick me.

But following these courses finally paid off: I could create more projects for my portfolio laurenavarro.wixsite.com/portfolio (for example “Myks”) and a company in France hired me as a Designer. They liked my broad skills not only focused in product design. And considering how much UX and the internet of things are growing, my profile convinced them.

I’m totally sure that without my own website, the projects on my portfolio and the courses I could add to my CV they wouldn’t have even considered my application. I’m glad I found courses like Gymnasium’s ones and hope they will be helpful for many people like it was for me.

French Designer Laure Navarro Wins the 2017 Gymnasium Excellence in Online Learning Award was originally published in Gymnasium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.