Does a seminar help you to understand the beauty industry better?

My FIT Beauty Industry Essential course review! I took the Beauty Industry Essential course, which is a programme that’s supposed to give you essential knowledge to help your career in the beauty world. While I learned some interesting things, I can’t say it was in any way ground breaking or gave me incredible insights. But let me tell you about it – maybe it’s for you?

What, where, who, how?

The Fashion Institute of Technology (NYC) offers a lot of programmes. The Beauty Industry Essentials webinar is an online non-credit certificate programme that’s self-paced with rolling admissions. You’ve one year to finish the course after you enrolled.

The course sounds definitely impressing, especially after having a look at the lecturers’ list: Bobbi Brown, Allure’s editor in Chief Michelle Lee, Poppy King, Hannah Bronfman, and employees from MAC, Givaudan, Shiseido… That looks like a bunch of professionals who know what they’re talking about, right?

Also, the topics of the course sound great as well. The seven segments are History of Beauty, Cosmetic Artistry, Business of Fragrance, Product Development, Packaging and Presentation, Marketing, Beauty Media.

The course is aimed to:

“Issue-oriented lessons on key career paths within the beauty and cosmetics industries; Real-world activities and assignments designed to explore the lessons in more depth; (and) Career advice and insights with seasoned experts and young professionals within the industry” per the FIT.

The schedule

Each of the seven modules consists of up to 11 short videos – from the introduction to the topic to the lessons itself, and at the end of each module, some career stories. Interspersed with that are pop quizzes and other assignments – mostly short texts to write. FIT says that each module is supposed to take two to three hours, which I didn’t find to be the case. I needed roughly one day per module – especially when assignments were bigger.

My experiences

As far as further education experiences go, this one is great – you log in with your beverage of choice in hand and let a professional tell you things. The online experience is smooth, and if you’ve got questions, the FIT counsellors help you quickly and substantially.

The sound, from time to time, differs in volume, but speakers mostly enunciate clearly, being easy to understand. As a non-native speaker, I had only one problem with a confusing sentence – which the help desk cleared up for me quickly.

What I found majorly annoying was thatyou need specific supplies. Being in China at the time when I took the course, it wasn’t always easy for me to get those on the drop of a hat. How great if the course came with a list of provisions you need! I do not have three different kinds of citrus fruits at home at any given day, for example.

Also, if writing doesn’t come to you easily, this might not be the course for you. I write a lot, I’m able to write quickly, but even for me three assignments to write for ONE module were a bit much.

I also found the testimonials at the end of each module rather superfluous. These are mostly real life founders, influencers, and beauty professionals, telling you about their career. How many times can you repeat ‘be passionate’ and ‘be yourself’?!

The content

When it came to the course content, I was most excited about Cosmetic Artistry and Fragrance, and most professionally curious about marketing and media.

I was, nevertheless, surprised that much of the colour cosmetics module concentrated on colour theory – not my fave topic in the world! Fragrance told me a lot about creating fragrances, and introduced a job in the industry I didn’t even know it existed before: the evaluator, who is to fragrances as an editor is to texts.

Product knowledge and development was strangely mostly about skincare. The thing I took away from it was (depressingly) that product forms take precedence over function. It also gave me the most hated assignment of the whole course – a market analysis that really drove home the old adage of not trusting any statistic you haven’t fabricated yourself… Packaging and Presentation was one of the dullest modules. Unsurprisingly, packaging design is used to communicate a brand’s identity. You don’t say!

…seen from my field of work

I have a slew of notes on the marketing segment, which is somewhat unsurprising; as beauty, in this course, is something you sell. As an editor, I found the approach to Beauty Media interesting (I’ve definitely heard ‘is there real journalism in beauty?’ before), but found the approach overly glib, especially in this age of undisclosed ads and the somewhat unholy alliance between ad and editorial, however the medium. Ads make the world go round in beauty journalism, and simple maxims of ‘find a unique voice’ and ‘be truthful’ are far from the reality of beauty journalism as I know it. Even more jarring was that the lecturer on this is Michelle Lee, the editor in chief of Allure magazine.

There was also one module on social media, which I found already, one year after the course’s launch, incredibly dated. ‘Engage with your audience’ is surely good advice, but in a sea of influencers that definitely won’t make you stand out today.

What I learned

The main thing I took away from it was not to think like a consumer, but a professional in the industry. This is, in the end, about selling a product. If I should do that or not – the jury’s still out on that.

I wanted it to be more. Especially when you already work in a field that a module covers, you can see how basic the info actually is. The lectures are usually two-minute sound bites that you can look up somewhere, condensed for easy absorption. Nevertheless – some modules and assignments were a lot of fun, especially when it came to topics I’m interested in. They let me see how much I love the beauty industry. (Writing copy for the launch of a new fragrance is like writing a bodice-ripper – I huuugely enjoyed that. Hah!)

Grey areas

You’ll receive your certificate relatively quickly after finishing the course (in my case, about a week afterwards). I would’ve really appreciated more info on how the coursework is graded and how good/bad my assignments were, but you don’t get that info. Also I would’ve liked to know who graded the papers, and on what basis – was it already sufficient to hand something in? And then: where does my course work end up? Because – if FIT gets a lot of students, they’ll also get some invaluable insights into the students’ approach to beauty and their insights into the beauty market. That’s a lot of interesting data!

For whom is this, given my experiences?

This is truly a beginners’ course, no matter what area they are interested in when it comes to beauty. I also find that as someone older, already experienced in job life, all those info about getting into a job, internships etc., didn’t hold much value for me and are the reason that I wouldn’t recommend this course when you’re already working (in whatever field).

Costs

Happily, the costs of this course were covered by a further education fund for expat spouses when I was in China. Meaning, I didn’t pay for it myself, but it wasn’t sponsored as well. My husband’s expat package just included things like further education courses, which I was happy to use. The price is high (it seems like they had a price hike, because I remember it being around $750, while right now it’s $999), but I’d recommend getting on their mailing list. I got frequent offers for reduced prices, and even one where the price was 50% off.

Please note that this review is not sponsored in any way. We buy products ourselves, with our own money, and don’t accept exchanging goods, or money, for reviews. We are completely independent, and our reviews reflect that.