Entry level service design

How to we ensure our industry has a future?

About a month ago I put a post on LinkedIn asking people their views on why there are not more entry level routes into Service Design. It attracted quite an audience and we got a good conversation going. I wanted to capture the insight shared and publish a piece people could refer back to when doing this work.

Firstly I think the fact it attracted so much attention shows there is definitely a problem here. I know this is the case as I speak to people regularly through my free walk n talks who are struggling to enter the industry. There are both young people graduating from BA or MA courses or people looking to shift careers.

So why is this a problem?

The client to consultancy model

A large proportion of service designers work in design consultancies. This is where I spent the start of my career as a service designer when I shifted from working in the brand space. There are multiple barriers to integrating junior roles into design consultancies and most of these stem from the way clients and consultancies work together. 

Multiple people who contributed to the discussion on LinkedIn, including Hilary Stephenson, Rebecca Rae-Evans and Louise Mushet, stated client expectations as a barrier to integrating junior roles into design consultancy projects. Clients perceive junior level staff to be too much of a risk for work of this nature and therefore stipulate the level of experience they require. This has a number of knock on effects:

• Design consultancies will ‘hide’ junior staff in projects because they believe in offering these opportunities but the client wont pay for them. This leads to the consultancy bearing the cost despite junior staff members making valuable contributions to project work. 

• Senior staff get burnt out because they are constantly resourced onto projects without a break and lack junior staff to delegate to. This leads to people leaving nobody replacing them.

• People looking to enter the industry apply for senior roles when they are not ready and struggle because the support mechanisms are not in place to support them.

Something that could help here, as offered by Sarah Drummond, is improving transparency of costing. Being able to build junior members of staff into a project and demonstrating what role they will play may help to build trust between both parties. 

Ultimately consultancies and clients need to work together to recognise the benefits of building juniors into project work. For the client it would be more cost effective as you free up senior members of staff to focus where they are most needed. Juniors can also often be the people on the team with the freshest ideas. For the consultancy it’s an investment in people and staff retention as investing in people early often builds loyalty. This is also a way to ensure you’re looking after your senior staff.

Service design is seen as a senior level skillset

A few people contributed to the discussion to say they believed service design to be a skillset that takes time to develop and therefor junior level roles are not appropriate. Add to this the fact  that service designers often take on a leadership role in projects and there is a perception that service design is a senior level role. 

I can see both sides of this argument. A lot of the skills I use on a daily basis do take time to develop. I have a toolbox of tools and methods I have honed over time and have experience of testing them in different settings. The relational aspects of my work, like bringing people together and creating safe spaces, have also taken time to build.

However, I don’t see how we can simply rule out the idea of people working in this discipline at an entry level. Our work is relatively low risk in the grand scheme of things, if we can have junior doctors surely we can have junior service designers.

There are a number of things that could help. I think it’s important to recognise that we need to create the conditions for multiple routes into the industry:

• People moving straight from a graduate course will have the tools and methods but they may not have the work experience. The conditions required to train and support these people should be focused on building the softer skills of service design through practical work experience.

• On the other hand, people shifting into the industry may have years of work experience that makes them perfectly capable of working in service design but they don’t have the tools and methods. Support in this case should be more focused on helping them up skill on the theory and giving them opportunities to test out approaches in a safe and supported environment.

• It was also pointed out that a route in could be via a different design discipline like UX or content design. These people will obviously have the design mindset but may need support to develop the specific skills required in the service space.

• Most importantly, as Sarah Drummond pointed out, there needs to be a mindset shift amongst everyone. Getting experience in a service organisation and integrating a design mindset into somewhere like a care home or an airline could be valuable experience but it’s not viewed as highly as someone who’s has held the title of ‘Service Designer’. Employers hiring Service Designers need to recognise this experience as valuable and shift their approach to hiring.

We also can’t talk about this without acknowledging that our industry is still a largely white, middle class occupation and whatever efforts we put into opening up access should be focused on access for all. Efforts in this space are still very limited. Nexer Digital have a partnership in place with Diverse and Equal and Love Circular are doing great work in this space. I’m sure there are other efforts out there but sadly it’s still left largely to individuals in organisations to advocate for this.

Access to training and development

Lastly, as pointed out in this video, access to training and development is still prohibited for a lot of people. MA courses are wildly expensive. While the market for short courses has improved they still come at a cost and it’s the same for conferences. 

One of the biggest problems is a lot of the training and development out there is theory based or centered around the tools and methods of service design. Service design is such a practical discipline that is so dependent on context. We need to work together to offer more hands on opportunities for people to build their experience of directly working in the industry.

I was so pleased to see the service design apprenticeship launch last week. I know this has been a huge amount of work by a small, dedicated group of people from the industry but I really believe this is what we need. The problem is, we need much more of this. While I’d hoped Made Tech’s Academy would be the start of agencies building offerings in this space, things seemed to have stalled. 

Lastly I think freelancers like me have a role to play too and this is where my thinking is currently centered. How can we offer up opportunities to people looking to enter the industry? Could there be an agency model of the future that buddies seniors with juniors to bring a combination of fresh thinking and experience with a transparent business model behind it? 

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject. Let’s continue discussing in the comments or feel free to drop me an email.