You Told Us The Gap Is Real, So We Built Somewhere To Start.

Hundreds of you told us the gap is real, and the question that kept coming up afterwards was what on earth we were actually going to do about it.

When we started talking about Bridging the Gap, we honestly had no idea how many people in fashion would see what we were seeing, and hundreds of fashion professionals later, we have our answer, which is that you see it too, and it has been rather wonderful to find that out and has also left us feeling very slightly accountable.

Experienced people right across the industry have told us that there is a growing gap between what people learn about fashion and the knowledge they need once they are actually doing the job, while at the same time an enormous amount of that knowledge already exists and is sitting with people who have spent 10, 20, 30 or more years working in fashion, and the trouble is that we do not have a particularly good way of getting one to the other.

That is what Bridging the Gap is all about, and after all the conversations, comments and messages that have come our way, one question kept coming back over and over again, which was: what are we actually going to do about it? Since that is a very fair question, we have built somewhere to start.

Introducing Bridging the Gap

This is the first practical step we have taken as part of Bridging the Gap, and before anybody gets carried away, we should say that we have not built the solution to fashion's education gap, because that would be quite a claim and we would like to be able to look you in the eye at the next trade show, so what we have built is a starting point.

It helps you take the knowledge and experience you have gathered during your career and look at it from a rather different perspective by asking what, specifically, somebody else could learn from you. You start by creating a free account and identifying your area of fashion expertise, and Bridging the Gap then helps you explore that expertise in the context of specific subjects that could potentially be taught as short courses.

This matters because most experienced fashion professionals don't lack knowledge; they have the opposite problem: they know far too much.

A career does not organise itself neatly into teachable subjects, since it is a glorious jumble of roles, projects, difficult decisions, things that went wrong, things you learnt to spot before they went wrong, conversations with factories, customers, suppliers, buyers and colleagues, and thousands of small pieces of knowledge that you now barely think about.

Much of what you once had to learn has become obvious to you, although it is not obvious to someone with five years of experience, and it is definitely not obvious to someone with none, and Bridging the Gap helps you start breaking all of that accumulated experience down into more focused areas of knowledge that somebody else might actually want to learn.

From Expertise To A Potential Course

Finding something you could teach is useful, and the next question is whether there is a reason to teach it, so for the subjects you identify, Bridging the Gap gives you access to research into their potential commercial viability as short courses.

In other words, we are interested in more than what you could teach, and we would like to help you start thinking about who needs this, what problem it solves and whether there is a potential commercial opportunity around it, because knowing a lot about something does not automatically mean there is a viable course in it, and there also needs to be somebody who wants to learn it, and preferably more than one somebody.

If you are going to spend your time developing a course, it seems entirely reasonable to want some indication that there is a market for the subject before you spend weeks or even months creating it. And if you find an idea you want to pursue, the app can take you another step forward by drafting a course outline around your chosen subject.

That doesn't mean the app suddenly writes your course for you, since your knowledge is still the important part.

What it gives you is something to react to and develop: a starting structure that helps you think about what the course might cover, how your expertise could be broken into teachable areas and what a learner might need to understand along the way; and for anyone who has ever stared at a blank document thinking I know this subject inside out, but where on earth do I start, that is a properly useful step.

So instead of leaving you with a vague idea that perhaps you ought to teach something one day, Bridging the Gap helps you move through a more practical process: identify the expertise, explore the potential opportunity, and start shaping it into a course.

It helps you find and examine an opportunity before you invest significant time in building it, and then gives you a starting point if you decide it is worth pursuing, which is why it sits right at the heart of Bridging the Gap, there to help you see what is possible before you decide where you want to go.

Create your free account and explore Bridging the Gap 

The Question Isn't Really "What Could I Teach?"

If you have worked in fashion for a long time, you could probably teach quite a lot, which is actually part of the problem, because trying to turn an entire career into a course is a fairly reliable way to end up with an enormous list of ideas and no idea what to do next.

A more useful question is what you know that solves a specific problem for somebody who has not yet learnt what you have learnt, and that changes things quite a lot.

Perhaps you know how to avoid expensive mistakes when working with manufacturers, or you understand fit in a way that only comes from years of seeing the same problems repeatedly.

Maybe you know how to build a commercially viable range, negotiate with suppliers, work effectively with buyers, develop technical specifications, source materials, manage production, communicate an idea, merchandise a collection or navigate one of the many specialist areas that rarely fits neatly into a conventional curriculum.

We could keep listing examples all afternoon, which is rather the point, because fashion is an industry made up of thousands of areas of specialist knowledge, and some of those areas are poorly served by the education currently available, and that is the gap we are interested in.

There Is Another Question We Need To Ask

Bridging the Gap is about more than preserving industry knowledge, because we also want to create opportunities for the people who hold that knowledge.

If you have spent decades developing expertise, we do not think there is anything wrong with wanting to earn an income from teaching it, and in fact it is an important part of making this work, since for specialist knowledge to become more accessible, experienced professionals need a practical reason and a practical way to share it.

Online courses, coaching, mentoring, masterclasses, and other forms of specialist education make that possible, because they let an experienced professional take a relatively small part of what they know and teach it to people who need that knowledge, without having to become a full-time lecturer or build an entire education business overnight. That puts the commercial question right at the heart of the model, where it belongs, and hardly makes it an awkward extra.

One of the things we are trying to answer with Bridging the Gap is whether we can help experienced fashion professionals identify the knowledge people need, turn it into useful education, and build an income around delivering it.

This Isn't About Replacing Fashion Education

Some conversations around Bridging the Gap have naturally touched on universities, colleges, and fashion schools, and we don't see this as an either-or argument, since formal fashion education has an important job to do in providing structure, breadth, foundations, qualifications, and an environment in which people can develop.

Anyone who has worked in fashion also knows there is another education waiting for you when you arrive in the industry, and it comes from actually doing the work.

It is discovering that the technically correct answer is not always the commercially sensible one, and it is understanding why something that looked perfectly straightforward on paper suddenly is not when there is a factory, a deadline and a budget involved, and it is knowing what to look for because you have seen the problem before, and occasionally it is learning something extremely useful at 4.45 on a Friday afternoon when you would really rather not have learnt it at all.

That kind of knowledge is hard to capture in a broad curriculum, but it is exactly what an experienced specialist can teach. A short course doesn't have to teach someone everything about fashion buying, garment technology, sourcing, footwear, merchandising, styling, production, or any other discipline; it can solve one specific problem extremely well, and that is where we think experienced fashion professionals have an important role to play.

Why Are We Launching This Now?

The simple answer is that many of you have effectively asked us to, since the reaction to Bridging the Gap has been much more than agreement that there is a problem, and we have also heard from people who want somebody to take a lead and start working out what could be done about it.

We are happy for We Teach Fashion to take a lead on that, although taking a lead does not mean disappearing for a year and emerging with a giant platform that we announce is the answer, because we would much rather start with something useful, put it in front of experienced fashion professionals and see what happens.

We want to find out what we have got right, what we have got wrong and what would make it more useful, and then we can build the next part based on what we learn, which is why we are calling this a soft launch. Bridging the Gap is a starting point, and we fully expect it to develop as more people use it, and that is rather the idea.

We Need Your Experience To Build This Properly

There is an interesting irony here: we are trying to solve a problem involving the transfer of industry knowledge, and it would be odd to try to work everything out without involving the industry. The response we have had so far has helped shape our thinking, and now we would like to move from talking about the problem to testing practical ways of addressing it, so if you have spent years working in fashion.

We would love you to try Bridging the Gap, explore the subjects connected with your expertise, look at the research, find an opportunity that interests you and have a go at creating a course outline.

You do not have to decide you are going to become an online educator by Tuesday, because we are interested in what happens when experienced fashion professionals start looking at their careers through a different lens. So that instead of asking what jobs they have done, they begin asking what they know now that other people are still trying to learn.

Some people may discover a course idea, others may realise that coaching, mentoring, workshops or another format makes more sense, some may uncover a surprisingly specific piece of expertise they had never considered valuable before, and others might use the app and tell us we have missed something important, which is useful too.

This Is The First Part Of The Bridge

Bridging the Gap is bigger than an app; it is the wider work we are doing around a question we think matters to the future of fashion education: how we make the industry's specialist knowledge more accessible while creating worthwhile opportunities for the people who have spent their careers acquiring it.

We do not have every answer, but what we do have is hundreds of fashion professionals telling us the question is worth pursuing, so we are starting, and Bridging the Gap is the first practical step.

You can create a free account, explore your area of expertise, investigate potential short course opportunities and even start drafting an outline for a course you might want to develop, and then we would love you to tell us what you think, including what was useful, what surprised you, what is missing and what we should be looking at next, because if we are going to bridge this gap, we would much rather build the bridge with the people who actually know what is on the other side.

Explore Bridging the Gap 

Hundreds of you told us the gap is real, and this is where we are starting.