Transitioning Careers — Advice from a Service Design team

What advice do you have on transitioning into a career in service design?

Our service designers come from a mix of different disciplines. Some have a University degree in a related discipline such as graphic design, product design, psychology or literature. Some have experience in other areas, and translated their value & expertise from another discipline into the Service Design space.

Some advice below…

Make it personal. Think about the services you use and your experiences with them. What works well? What enrages you? What could be better? Your personal story and relationships with the services you use are fertile ground for understanding why you want to make the switch to service design and how to communicate that desire to others.

Learn by doing. There are some great courses out there (including our Design School course Making Sense of Service Design), that will give you a taster of the methods and lenses through which service designers understand services and systems.

Create a portfolio. A portfolio of service design projects is essential to make the switch. But, these can be projects you’ve undertaken as part of a course, a service design jam or independently. A portfolio is also a great opportunity to showcase other transferable skills such as graphic design or research, both of which are valued in service design. Portfolios can exist in a variety of formats: websites, slide presentations or word documents.

Show, don’t tell. The most important element of a portfolio for someone moving into service design is demonstrating you understand and can implement the UCD process (most commonly the double diamond). Including artefacts from your projects such as photos of field research, diagrams, maps, alongside annotations is a great way to show this. Mentoring platforms such as Mega Mentor are fantastic for gathering feedback on your portfolio, as well as asking a wide selection of service designers questions about their experiences of the field.

Adopt the service design mindset. However, in many ways, service design is a mindset rather than a formalised skill. Familiarise yourself with the language used by service designers and reframe your work in that language. If you’ve done academic research, look at the similarities between your work and the discovery phase in UCD for example. Embed yourself in the community on Twitter or by attending events.

Be relentlessly curious. “I have no special talents,” Einstein wrote to a friend “I am just passionately curious.” Designers are curious in the world around them, be curious in people and places, engage where you can, at events, on twitter, ask questions and make friends not contacts. Write about your learning and share it on Medium or LinkedIn, in formats you like to express yourself. Service Designers are on the whole a friendly bunch and love to share their knowledge, mentors as above are fantastic, but so are communities like SDN that share contacts, job opportunities and advice. There are also lots of talks, meetups and free online events and constant twitter conversations.

Some more brain food for the curious

• Become a service designer in government step by step
• Here is a great talk by Jamin Hegeman: “So you want to be a Service Designer”
• How to Kick Start your Service Design career — The Service Design Show

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