Fired Up upskilling course

AI-Native Designer

Are you a designer feeling the ground shift beneath your career? Or ready to become the designer every modern product team is hiring for?

The design market has changed faster in the past two years than in the previous twenty. AI now sits inside every design tool, every product, and every hiring conversation. Companies are no longer looking for designers who use AI occasionally — they’re looking for AI-native designers who can shape what gets built, integrate AI into their entire workflow, and articulate the value of design in this new era.

Our AI-Native Designer course prepares you for exactly that. Whether you come from product, UX, visual, or graphic design, you’ll learn how to redesign your process with AI, design for AI-powered products, and position yourself as a strategic partner — not someone whose work AI can replace. You graduate with a portfolio, a manifesto, and a clear point of view on design in the AI age.

100% funded

3-month training fully-funded by Agentur für Arbeit.

AI woven through every project

skillset

You don’t learn tools in isolation. You learn how to think, design, and ship with AI across every stage of your work.

A portfolio that opens doors

Three real design projects plus a personal capstone, work you can show hiring managers, not just a certificate.

What to expect

The AI-Native Designer program is a hands-on, practice-oriented upskilling course built and led by experienced design and AI professionals. The focus is real-world application: you’ll design, build, test, and iterate on actual projects throughout the course.

You’ll move through three core design projects — starting with an individual brief that builds foundational confidence, then a group project that mirrors real product team collaboration, then a complex individual project that demonstrates synthesis and strategic thinking. Alongside these, you’ll develop a personal capstone project tied to your career goals.

From the first week, AI is integrated into how you work. You’ll redesign your creative process with AI, design AI-powered product features, map agentic flows and interaction patterns, build prototypes, and run user tests — all while developing the human skills hiring managers care about most: prompt craft as a design discipline, systems thinking, design rationale, stakeholder communication.

You’ll also work with the tools modern design teams actually use: Figma, Adobe, Claude, alongside emerging tools like Midjourney and Lovable.

The course is designed around a clear principle: AI doesn’t replace good design — it raises the bar for what good design means. The designers who will thrive are those who can shift from designing outputs to defining the rules that generate them, from executing pixels to shaping the systems and constraints that AI works within.

Synchronous learning matters too: mornings are live and collaborative — cohort syncs, clinics, peer exchanges, Friday workshops. Afternoons are for independent application. This rhythm is where the hire-able skills get built: critical thinking, clear communication, giving and receiving design critique. AI doesn’t replace those. AI amplifies them.

Duration: 3 Months Full-time

Scope: comprises approximately 510 hours, including 68 training days, 7,5 hours a day

Certification: AI-Native Designer certification from Fired Up

Tuition: Free, with Bildungsgutschein

Format: 50 % live online sessions, 50% self-paced learning

Language: English

Cohort Size: 12 – max. 24 people

Prior experience: Some exposure to foundational design concepts and tools like Figma or Adobe

What else?A Claude Pro account, Figma Pro for the duration of the course, plus a Career Bootcamp with 1-on-1 support from top recruitment coaches.

Next cohort:

June 29th

Get in touch to learn more

What will you learn:

L

Module 1: The AI-Powered Design Process

Adapting the design process for AI — ideation, fidelity, wireframes, prototypes
Prompt craft as a design thinking skill
Generating design assets — image, type, color, layout — with AI
Designing for accessibility in the AI age
The role of the designer and what hiring managers are looking for now

L

Module 2: Product Design for AI

Designing AI-powered features for existing products
Mapping AI user flows and interaction patterns
Designing for emerging UX patterns: chat interfaces, agentic flows, generative UI
Handling latency, transparency, and trust in AI experiences
Prototyping and testing AI-powered products with real users

L

Module 3: Design Strategy in the AI Age

Cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, and data teams
Design systems and scalability with AI
Strategic alignment: connecting design to business outcomes
Ethics, compliance, and regulation for AI-driven design
Writing your Design Manifesto: your point of view on AI in design

L

Module 4: Career Advancement Bootcamp

Building an AI-native design portfolio
LinkedIn and resume optimization for design roles in the AI era
Case study writing for hiring scenarios
Mock interviews and design critique role-play
Hiring manager simulations

Get in touch to learn more

Meet your trainers

Pete Armitage

Trainer

Pete leads UX Design at Proxify, where he runs AI education across R&D and builds workshops for cross-functional teams. As a long-time design mentor at CareerFoundry and guest speaker on Responsible AI, he shows participants how AI actually changes the day-to-day work of designers.

Hannah Baker

Trainer

Hannah is Co-Founder of The Fountain Institute, where she has designed and led cohort-based courses for 1000+ senior designers on research, strategy, and facilitation. With a Master’s in Art & Museum Education and a background building global designer communities, she brings deep expertise in how designers actually learn.

Chloe Benning

Learning Designer

The instructional concept for this course was designed by Chloe Benning, who works in product at Parloa, one of Europe’s leading AI companies. She keeps the curriculum aligned with how top companies are actually using AI tools and frameworks today.

This course is for designers who want to stay relevant — and become indispensable.

Whether you’re a:

Product designer wanting to design for AI-powered products
UI or UX designer adapting to AI-native workflows
Visual or graphic designer evolving toward product and systems thinking
Designer between roles, repositioning for the current market
Designer currently employed but worried about being left behind
Career changer with design experience moving into a more strategic role

You’ll graduate with the practical skills, portfolio, and confidence to compete for senior design roles in companies that are rebuilding around AI.

The skills you build here are deliberately tool-agnostic. Tools will change — they always do. What won’t change is the value of designers who can think strategically about AI, communicate that thinking clearly, and ship work that drives business outcomes.

Potential roles after completing this program

Product Designer
UX / UI Designer
AI Product Designer
Senior Product Designer
Design Strategist
Design Systems Designer
Interaction Designer
Visual / Brand Designer (AI-native)
Design Lead

Next cohort:

June 29th

Get in touch to learn more

FAQs

Is this really free?

Are you registered at Agentur für Arbeit? Then the training will be covered for you. Just get in touch and we can help you requesting the voucher. It’s easier than you think ✨

Can I also pay for the training myself?

Yes, we also accept private clients. Get in touch for pricing.

What happens when one cohort is full?

That can happen quickly, as working in small groups is part of the learning experience. You’d have to wait for the next cohort to begin, just get in touch.

I am english speaking, can I join?

Yes! The course is open for english speakers. All materials will be available in english.

Do I need to be a product designer specifically?

No. The course is built for designers from product, UX, visual, and graphic backgrounds. Module 1 covers ground that’s familiar to all designers; from Module 2 onward, you can shape your project work toward your career direction — whether that’s product, UX, or strategic/visual roles.

We created this training to empower job seekers and career changers to step into future-proof roles as project managers, equipped with practical skills and a mindset for positive impact.

Do I need to know AI tools already?

No. The course starts from foundations and builds up. By the end of Module 1, you’ll be comfortable. By the end of the course, you’ll be fluent — and more importantly, you’ll know how to evaluate and adopt whatever AI tools come next.

We created this training to empower job seekers and career changers to step into future-proof roles as project managers, equipped with practical skills and a mindset for positive impact.

Will this course be outdated in six months?

We’ve built the course to be tool-agnostic on purpose. The specific AI tools will keep changing. The skills you build — prompt craft as design thinking, designing for AI interaction patterns, communicating design value, systems thinking — are durable. You’ll learn how to adapt as the landscape shifts, not just how to use today’s tools.

We created this training to empower job seekers and career changers to step into future-proof roles as project managers, equipped with practical skills and a mindset for positive impact.