College students are becoming increasingly proficient with Canva as more higher ed institutions, including the University of California, harness the full Canva for Campus visual suite. This enables more seamless collaboration for group projects, along with the visual upscaling of myriad in-classroom assignments and broader campus activities, not to mention artificial intelligence upskilling as students embrace Magic Studio.
Students don’t stop benefitting from Canva after graduation. Institutions that incorporate Canva are actually giving their students a leg up when it comes to making the jump to the workforce.
Helping Job Seekers Visually Stand Out in the Application Process
Long gone are the days where hiring managers read the entirety of every résumé they receive from job applicants. According to Indeed, employers now look at résumés for just six to seven seconds apiece, on average — making it imperative for new job seekers to do something that will help them visually stand out.
READ MORE: Canva for Campus gives students creative tools to succeed.
For many, this can be a daunting undertaking. However, students and recent graduates proficient in Canva have an advantage. Even without professional design training, they can leverage Canva's templates and design tools to create visually appealing résumés; likewise with their portfolio, whether they produce that as a presentation or a full website. These visual elements help candidates showcase their individuality more effectively than traditional black text on white paper.
“Making résumés more interactive, using color, using different fonts, using links to digital portfolios, just helps make it more you,” explains Amy Schultz, formerly the global head of talent acquisition at Canva, in Employee Benefit News. “Leaning into visuals and away from pure text is something that job seekers can do to help them shine and stand out in a digital age.”
Employers are in clear agreement. In fact, most hiring managers prefer résumés with visual elements and believe purely text-based résumés will become obsolete in the next few years.
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Canva proficiency can play a pivotal role in helping job applicants stand out and land the position of their dreams. And once there, it can ease their integration into the new position.
Streamlining the Onboarding Process for New Hires
What do the Philadelphia Eagles, PayPal, Salesforce, Zoom and Sony Music have in common? They all use Canva. In fact, the online design and visual communication platform is used by more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies and has also been widely adopted by small and medium-sized businesses. Roughly 9 in 10 global business leaders believe visual communication tools can increase efficiency, enhance collaboration and have a positive return on investment.
This means recent graduates who used Canva throughout their college tenure may find it easier to get started in their new roles — especially given the increasingly advanced ways students have been using the platform in school.
“Instead of creating simple social media graphics and flyers, now they’re maybe creating advanced presentation decks or pitch decks if they’re in a business school, or maybe embedding data visualization if they’re a researcher,” Nick Gyani, North American lead for higher education at Canva, tells CDW.
>90%
The percentage of Fortune 500 companies that use Canva
Source: Canva, “Celebrating Canva’s growth in the US,” January 2024
Nori Barajas-Murphy, higher education ambassador at CDW, echoes this sentiment: “When these students get into the workforce, they’re bringing these skills with them from embedded into their curriculum.”
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This is true for students across disciplines, not just those intending to go into graphic design, animation or some other visually focused profession. Today, 92% of global business leaders expect all employees to have the design acumen needed to communicate effectively within their organization. This means Canva proficiency may prove just as useful for an engineer as it does for someone in website design or social media marketing.
“In this visual economy and visual world we live in, design has become important to everybody in every role,” says Gyani. “So, I think it’s really important for those skills to develop over time and evolve from kindergarten through college into the workforce.”
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