Have You Got What it Takes to Be a Lego Designer?

It's brutal. For my child and I, or my son and I, it's all about realisation and time spent together versus creating it in a timeline for a specific purpose. Yeah, it's brutal. I felt pressure. It's not just playing, it's actually quite a lot of thinking and under pressure it's quite difficult. A lot of us have fond and fun memories of building with Lego bricks when we were kids. But imagine you had to build under the pressure of having your job depend on it. That's the reality for the 21 hopeful designers that have been selected to come to Lego's annual recruitment workshop. Basically what we're testing during these exercises is both their building skills, how they work with Lego bricks, their creativity, how well they are at conceptualising and then their sketching skills. And it's a chance for them to have a go at being a designer for Lego. It's very similar to the tasks that our design teams work on on a daily basis. It allows us to see how they work with the various challenges we set and it's a much more relaxed environment than a formal interview. In some exercises, the designers sketch up new ideas and at other times they are simply handed bags of bricks and asked to start building. After they finish, the projects are evaluated by a team of Lego designers who look for different things in different designers. We have a very, very broad range of design positions within the company, from people that literally just sit and build Lego models right the way through to guys that sketch characters and do concept boards and concept artwork. The applicants have varied backgrounds and experiences. Some are straight out of college and others have spent over 20 years designing in impressive fields. But the appeal of working for Lego is clear. Getting to be a kid again, I think. I've been playing with it for 43 years and now that I have kids myself, my son suggested to me that he wanted to be a Lego designer when he grows up and I thought, hey, that would be a great idea.