Month notes

Finding a service design or UX design role takes longer and asks more of you than it did a few years ago. There are fewer openings, more applicants for each one, and hiring processes with more stages in them.

That doesn't make it a lottery. Most of what makes a difference is within your control: being clear about the role you want, looking in the right places, and telling the story of your work well. This post goes through those in roughly the order you'll meet them.

Decide which role you're actually going for

Job titles in design are unreliable, so read the responsibilities and not the title. A "UX designer" advert can describe end-to-end service work, and a "service designer" advert can turn out to be screen design with a journey map attached.

The honest difference is scope:

• Service design looks at the whole service, across channels, teams and back-office processes. The outputs are blueprints, journey maps and future-state models, and you spend most of your time with policy, operations and frontline staff. Hiring managers will probe your systems thinking, your facilitation, and how you influence people you don't manage.
• UX or interaction design looks at a product or transaction within that service. The outputs are flows, prototypes and patterns, and you spend most of your time with product managers, developers, researchers and content designers. Hiring managers will probe your craft, your accessibility knowledge, and how you iterate from evidence.

If you could do either, pick one as your lead and frame the other as a strength. A portfolio that tries to be equally both tends to read as neither.

A portfolio that tries to be equally both tends to read as neither.

In the UK public sector, the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework sets out the skills expected at each level for service designers and interaction designers. It's a useful benchmark for working out which grade to go for, even when the job is outside government.

Where to look

No single job board covers design roles well, so use a small set of sources and check them on a routine.

• Public sector boards. Civil Service Jobs and NHS Jobs list permanent roles in government and health. Adverts are often only open for a couple of weeks, so set up email alerts.
• LinkedIn. Useful for volume and for seeing who's hiring. Follow heads of design at organisations you like, because plenty of roles get shared by the hiring manager before they appear anywhere else.
• Design communities. Slack groups, local meetups and service design networks carry roles that are never formally advertised, and people there will tell you what a team is really like.
• Specialist recruiters. Worth it for contract work and agency roles. Pick two or three who specialise in design and stay in regular contact.
• Direct approaches. A short, specific message to a design lead about their team's work gets more replies than you'd expect.

Keep a simple tracker of what you applied for, when, and what happened. After ten or so applications it'll show you which sources and which types of role are getting you interviews.

Make your portfolio show how you think

Hiring managers are looking for your reasoning, not your deliverables. Two or three case studies told well beat eight that are mostly screenshots.

A structure that works for each one:

1. The problem. Who was affected, what was going wrong, and how you knew.
2. Your role. What you personally did, as distinct from the team. Say "I" where it was you.
3. What you did and why. The decisions you made, the options you ruled out, and the evidence behind each choice.
4. What changed. The outcome for users and the organisation, with numbers where you have them.
5. What you'd do differently. Reflection signals seniority more than polish does.

Service design work is harder to show than screens, so make the invisible parts visible. Include the blueprint, but also explain the workshop that produced it, the stakeholder who needed persuading, and the operational change that followed.

If your work is under an NDA or involves sensitive data, anonymise it and say so. A redacted artefact with a clear story is fine. A password-protected site with no explanation often goes unopened.

Tailor your CV and application

A tailored application to five roles will usually do better than a generic one sent to fifty. Treat the job advert as a brief and answer it directly.

• Mirror the language of the advert. If it asks for "service blueprinting" and your CV says "process mapping", change it. Sifting is often done quickly against a list of criteria.
• Lead with outcomes. "Redesigned the booking journey, cutting missed appointments" says more than "responsible for booking journey design".
• Keep it to two pages. Put the most relevant work first, even if it isn't the most recent.
• Link to your portfolio at the top. Don't make anyone go looking for it.

Public sector applications work differently. Many ask for a personal statement or written answers scored against listed essential criteria or behaviours. Address each criterion explicitly, with one concrete example for each, using a structure like situation, task, action, result. If you don't evidence a criterion you won't be scored for it, however strong the rest of the application is.

Prepare for interviews and design tasks

Most design hiring processes have the same three parts: a portfolio walkthrough, competency questions, and some kind of task. Prepare for each separately.

Portfolio walkthrough. Pick one or two case studies that match the role and rehearse telling each in about ten minutes. Leave room for questions, because the conversation is where panels learn the most about you.

Competency questions. Prepare six to eight examples you can adapt: a disagreement with a stakeholder, a project that failed, a time research changed your mind, a time you worked within a hard constraint. For service design roles, expect questions about working across organisational boundaries.

Design tasks. These might be take-home exercises, live whiteboard sessions or presentations. Panels are assessing how you approach the problem, so state your assumptions, explain your trade-offs and say what you'd research next. If a take-home task looks like more than a few hours of unpaid work, it's reasonable to ask about the expected time.

Always have questions of your own. Asking how design is positioned in the organisation, how research gets done, and what happened to the last piece of design work will tell you a lot about what the job is really like.

Look after yourself while you search

A job search is a long project with slow, uneven feedback, and it helps to run it like one. Set working hours for it, and stop when they end.

• Expect silence. Many applications get no reply at all. That reflects volume on the hiring side, not the quality of your work.
• Ask for feedback after interviews. Not everyone gives it, but when they do it's the most useful information you'll get.
• Keep practising your craft. A side project, some volunteering or writing about your work gives you something recent to talk about and keeps your confidence up.
• Talk to other designers. People who are also searching, or who recently finished, are the best source of both leads and perspective.

Where to start this week

If you only do three things, do these:

• Decide whether service design or UX design is your lead, and rewrite your headline and summary to match.
• Rework one case study using the five-part structure above.
• Set up alerts on two job boards and message one design lead whose team you'd like to join.

The search is slow, but each of these compounds. A clearer story makes for better applications, and better applications lead to better conversations.