A route into service design for career shifters from under represented backgrounds
A group of people listening to a speaker sat in a company kitchen environment
I recently posted on LinkedIn about the lack of entry level routes into service design. The post generated a lot of interest and discussion which I summarised into a follow up post on my Substack.
Following these discussions I’ve since become aware of a handful of opportunities - which is great to see. Agencies like TPX Impact and BJSS are now running paid academies and the much anticipated service design apprenticeship was recently launched - although it’s still in need of organisations to actually offer the roles.
These initiatives are great for early career starters and while the TPX Academy does specifically encourage career shifters to apply, I’m wondering how many will apply due to the level of salary on offer. With this in mind there still seems to be a gap in the market for opportunities specifically designed for career changers. People that have the work experience and transferable skills but lack the specific design training.
An offer specifically for career shifters that champions diversity
Enter Diverse & Equal. Founded by Annette Joseph in 2018, Diverse & Equal was started for two reasons. To help businesses understand the benefits of diversity and to support people to move into the digital sector from other careers. They do this through research, taster sessions and bootcamps. Last year they ran a bootcamp with design and digital agency Nexer Digital that was initiated by Managing Director Hilary Stephenson. Hilary and Annette were kind enough to openly and honestly share their experiences with me in the hope it would inspire others to offer similar opportunities.
It all started when Hilary found herself with a recruitment need.
“We’ve done a lot over the years around inclusion and accessibility. Our business was growing at quite a pace and I was really nervous about creating a monoculture.”
At this point Hilary’s options were to go down the traditional recruitment routes of using recruiters or recruiting through networks. She could have also looked at starting a Nexer academy, but with nothing existing in place there was a big risk this would never get off the ground. Most importantly, Hilary knew that all these approaches would lack the focus on diversity she knew was important for her and the business. So she approached Annette.
“I wanted to be sure that Hilary and Nexer understood that this was going to be a commitment. We don’t train people then walk away. The analogy that I use is you don’t buy a tomato plant and put it in a cupboard for two weeks then shout at it to grow. It’s the environment, not the people. You have to work on your culture for this to work.”
The Diverse & Equal bootcamps are 12 weeks long. The standard bootcamp combines Agile and User-Centred Design methodologies with participants’ existing skills from roles in the public and private sectors, such as education, medicine, financial services, business, hospitality, retail, construction and more. Graduates develop the skills needed for mid-level roles in User Research, Service Design, Delivery Management, and UX Design.
The program provides a supportive environment led by industry experts, where participants work in teams to solve live briefs, gaining practical experience alongside theoretical knowledge. The bootcamp also puts a lot of emphasis on the softer skills required and preparing people for being ready to use their difference to challenge. The focus is very much on preparing people to be great team members.
By the end of the program, students graduate with extended knowledge of agile ceremonies and practices, an overview of six different disciplines, and a solid understanding of the good industry employability practices plus the skills, confidence and knowledge to make a successful transition in their selected role and excel on their new career paths.
“We train them to not just be excellent practitioners but also really good team members — equipping them with all the soft skills that make them great team assets.”
The bootcamp with Nexer was a true partnership. Using Diverse and Equal’s existing bootcamp offer, they worked together to tailor it specifically for Nexer. The bootcamp was designed to specifically target career shifters in the public sector. A lot of Nexer’s work is in this sector so Hilary was looking for people working in public services that had the appetite and transferable skills to move into design and research based consultancy roles. They focused purely on research, interaction design and service design as those were the skillsets they were looking to recruit to. They also built in a deeper focus on accessibility and preparing for consultancy life.
The bootcamp was fully funded by Nexer at broadly equivalent what it would have cost them to go through recruiters. Participants didn’t get paid but they also didn’t pay to participate. The programme was designed so they could participate while still working in their existing roles. Out of the 14 people who took part, eight went on to be employed by Nexer and two more have been employed elsewhere. The remaining four people stayed in their current roles and are continuing their learning on a more gradual path. Diverse & Equal are also providing ongoing support to Nexer as their new recruits onboard and settle in.
Learnings that inspired a redesigned offer
What I loved about speaking to Hilary and Annette was how open and honest they were about what worked and what could be improved. Diverse & Equal are already taking these learnings and channelling them into a redesigned offer for design agencies.
The biggest learning was around the ongoing support required and how to structure this. Annette’s focus is very much on helping to create the culture for people to thrive and the bootcamp showed that this needs to happen sooner, right from the start of the bootcamp rather than once they graduate. With this in mind she’s looking at building support for line managers into the newly designed bootcamp offer.
There was also a learning around the bonds people establish on the course and how that can create a dynamic once the programme is over. While the bond between the cohort is often really strong, this could risk making settling into the wider organisation more of a jump out of their comfort zones. Consideration needs to be given to how Diverse & Equal maintain that strength but design the programme to ensure the cohort feel like a part of the organisation from the start.
With all this in mind Annette is redesigning the bootcamp to take on more of an internal academy model. While the content and skillsets the cohort are trained in will remain the same, the new bootcamp will offer participants the opportunity to be employed from the start and gradually onboarded into the organisation. The bootcamp will be 9 weeks long and upon graduation, participants will be re-interviewed and have their salary increased to market rate. The agency partner is involved throughout working collaboratively to select the participants, deliver mentoring, pair the cohort up with line managers from the start and support them as new employees for 6 months after placement
Challenges for the industry that we need to address
Diverse & Equal are currently in the process of bringing this offer to market and actively looking for organisations to partner with. This is great, as are the other initiatives I previously mentioned but all these offers still face challenges that need to be addressed by the industry as a whole.
While agencies are moving in the right direction, clients are not always open to providing opportunities for emerging talent to train on their dime. There is a lack of understanding of the tremendous benefit of the transferable skills people have when they move from a different industry and a lack of confidence in paying for junior talent, with agencies like Nexer often taking a commercial hit by not billing this time back to clients.
There is also the perceived risk the clients are taking on. People have a fondness for the ‘same kind of person’ when taking on consultants. Add to this the challenges IR35 has put in place with clients wanting to recruit individuals through suppliers to bolster their teams, and it seems to me that our progress towards growing a diverse industry is slow going.
“Not only are these career changers but they are from ethnically diverse backgrounds. That’s perceived as double the risk, when in fact, it’s double the benefit.”
The fact is, we have no choice but to do better. Better at providing viable routes into our industry for both graduates and career shifters, better at meeting the outrageous demand we have for these roles and much much better at really doing the hard work to recruit people from under represented backgrounds. We need to dismantle the traditional approaches to recruitment that we all fall back on in times of panic and growth simply because they are the easier option. It’s not good enough anymore and Diverse & Equal have an answer.
If you’re interested in running a bootcamp with Diverse and Equal you can contact them here.