Senior Service Designer

As a Senior Service Designer you will:• provide service design leadership and direction and contribute more widely to the future of service design across government

• provide leadership for the user centred design team

• prioritise understanding the needs and actual behaviour of users and help teams use this insight to underpin and drive the work they do

• assess performance of services and teams against digital by default standards

• help others to think through, communicate and help people understand how things could be, using facilitation skills, sketches, scenarios and diagrams such as maps, blueprints and prototypes

• know how to design accessible digital services and help others to do so

• analyse demand and failure within a service, identify root causes for that failure, frame problems, identify desired outcomes and key measures – and facilitate others to do so

• lead discussions at a senior departmental level and successfully negotiate change (e.g. operational, organisational, policy, financial or technology) to support the delivery of better services

• mentor and coach individuals, service teams and other parts of the organisation, run training and workshops to facilitate learning.

Responsibilities

Essential Criteria & experience:

You will:

• Be an experienced service designer with a strong user-centered design practitioner background, skilled in designing good services

• Work with the teams and stakeholders to capture the entire perspective of your service and set the vision

• Have experience and evidence of designing or re-designing services to be more effective or efficient

• Have good knowledge of digital approaches and technology to understand how services can work better

• Be able to prototype services or parts of them, facilitate groups of people to contribute effectively to re-design them

• Be able to create diagrams and sketches that clearly communicate users’ journeys, interactions, and other behaviors through services

• Be able to communicate a clear rationale and evidence base for proposals or design decisions

• Be open to constructive criticism and be able to constructively review the work of others

• Be able to work effectively with and influence a wide range of stakeholders
have experience in helping others by expanding their knowledge to lead organizational change

• be experienced with user centered design in an agile environment as well as how to use hypotheses in design, make evidence-based design decisions and facilitate others in an organization to do so

Desirable skills & experience:

You will:

• Have a Design related degree or relevant industry experience

• be familiar with wider government strategy and its position on digital and design

• know how to make services accessible to the greatest range of people and needs

• be familiar with the government service design manual, service standards and design patterns

Applicants currently holding a permanent post in the Civil Service should note that, if successful, their salary on appointment would be determined by the Department’s transfer/promotion policies.

As a member of the DfE, you will be entitled to join the highly competitive Civil Service Pension Scheme, which many experts agree is one of the most generous in the UK.

You will have 25 days leave, increasing by 1 day every year to a maximum of 30 days after five years’ service. In addition, all staff receives the Queen’s Birthday privilege holiday and 8 days’ bank and public holidays.

We offer flexible working arrangements, such as job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time, and compressed hours.

As an organization, which exists to support education and lifelong learning, we offer our staff excellent professional development opportunities.