Service Designer

About The Role
We expect that your first 6 months will be spent working on two projects. One of which will be our Growth Impact Fund project – a new initiative focussed on funding underrepresented founders of social businesses, e.g. those that are women-led, black-led and LGBTQ-led. We are working on this in partnership with UnLtd and Big Issue Invest.
Your role on the project will be to work with the core Shift team and our partners to create plans for research and continuous learning using a range of different research, design and learning methods.
Your role on the project will be to:

• Map out the user journey of social entrepreneurs/founders and identify pain points or successful approaches that can be replicated in the wider sector
• Deliver workshops with local partners to test messaging and outreach approaches
• Conduct qualitative interviews with social entrepreneurs and delivery staff
• Do observation studies of fund committees to understand how decisions are being made
• Create online surveys for applicants to the Growth Impact Fund
• Facilitate workshops with the Growth Impact Fund team to reflect on what is and isn’t working
• Design simple tools and techniques and help to capture learning about what is and isn’t working within day-to-day work
• Respond to emerging insights and needs of the fund

All of this learning activity will support the Growth Impact Fund team to translate learning into feasible improvements in real time. You’ll also be analysing research and learning data from multiple methods and producing clear, evidence-based reports, creative outputs and ‘packaged’ tools or resources to share more widely in the sector.

What we’re looking for in our new hire

We strive for diversity in our team. We believe in order to be innovative, our team must be representative and inclusive. We’re keen to receive applications from people of all backgrounds, all ages, and all types of formal or informal education. We particularly welcome applications from people with disabilities, Black, Asian, or Minority Ethnic backgrounds, LGBTQIA and from different socio-economic and/ or educational backgrounds. All applicants must have the right to work in the UK.

Requirements

Must have experience

• You have three or more years experience working in a role focused on research, learning, service design or continuous improvement (we don’t mind what your job title has been before)
• You have experience in all stages of scoping, planning and delivering end-to-end research, learning or improvement projects
• You have a depth of experience in two of: qualitative interviews, observations, survey design, assumption testing, focus groups
• You have experience conducting analysis of different types of data (e.g. interview data, survey data) and using this to present back actionable insights or improvement opportunities
• You have experience facilitating groups or workshops, for example, to generate insights based on data collected, to have reflective or learning focused conversations or to co-design solutions to identified challenges
• You can self-manage (this means managing your own deadlines and planning your own learning and development)
• You have experience working with under-represented groups (underrepresented groups are groups of individuals with characteristics outlined in, but not exclusive to, the Equality Act 2010)

Bonus points for any of these (*although not essential)

• Experience working in an agency, consultancy or client-facing role
• Experience working with product, service or innovation designers
• Experience in quantitative data analysis, desk research, literature reviews, developing impact frameworks or running rapid prototyping/experimentation
• Experience working with social businesses or knowledge of how social businesses get funded
• Experience setting up and supporting others to run research activities and to surface ongoing learning

Benefits

• You’ll get 25 days annual leave, 8 bank holidays, an additional day for each year at Shift, and discretionary bonus leave over the Christmas period
• Work from home on Mondays and Fridays
• Access to childcare vouchers
• A bike to work scheme
• Matched pension contribution up to 4%
• We support you with an onboarding buddy when you join to get you started (remember because we don’t do line management)