Senior Service Designer

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Senior Service Designer

Location: remote. This role can be based at any of Barnardo's national offices. Regular local and national travel will be required.

Help us design services that transform childhoods

At Barnardo's, we believe every child deserves a safe, happy and hopeful future. For over 150 years, we've been innovating to improve the lives of children, young people and families across the UK. Today, we run more than 800 services and are committed to making them excellent, inclusive and designed with the children, young people and families who use them.

As a senior member of the Service Design team, you will play a vital role in applying service design methods to deliver measurable improvements in service quality, efficiency, value and outcomes for children, young people and families.

We are continuing to strengthen how we design and improve services across Barnardo's, working across a complex and evolving portfolio that spans children's services, digital delivery and business development.

This role offers the opportunity to shape not only individual services, but how service design is used to support decision-making, prioritisation and innovation across the organisation.

This is a hands-on role as well as a strategic one - you'll be actively designing, prototyping and iterating services as well as shaping direction and decision-making.

As a Senior Service Designer, you will:

• Work across a portfolio of projects, balancing priorities and adapting to changing organisational needs

• Contribute to service development and proposals, working with business development colleagues to shape service models

• Influence decision-making and prioritisation, using evidence and insight to guide direction

• Identify opportunities to improve services in ways that deliver better outcomes, greater efficiency and value for money

• Lead the end-to-end design of services in complex environments, shaping user-centred, evidence-based solutions that respond to organisational priorities, and creating service maps, blueprints, prototypes and other design artefacts to bring ideas to life

• Test and iterate service concepts in response to feedback and learning, refining solutions to improve outcomes

• Ensure services are coherent and integrated across online and offline channels

• Work across functions including business development, digital, finance, operations, research and policy to engage stakeholders and support organisational change

• Mentor and support colleagues - developing confidence and skills, with the potential to provide line management support to junior designers where appropriate

• Develop practice and contribute to standards, frameworks and reusable design patterns

• Share learning internally and externally, contributing to professional communities of practice and helping raise the profile of service design at Barnardo's

This is a varied, hands-on and project-focused role that allows for autonomy, creativity and real impact. You'll be part of a warm, committed team that shares learning, supports wellbeing, and is united in a clear mission: designing for better outcomes for children and families.

You'll work with a high degree of autonomy, navigating complexity and ambiguity, delivering tangible improvements to services and contributing to a growing and evolving design practice.

What We're Looking For

We're looking for a Senior Service Designer who can:

• Work autonomously to lead the design of complex services

• Manage competing priorities effectively across projects, balancing time, focus and trade-offs

• Influence stakeholders and support organisational change beyond immediate project teams, communicating design decisions and complex ideas clearly to a range of audiences

• Understand how services operate within wider organisational systems, and use this to inform decision-making and support effective change

• Confidently use a range of evidence, including user research, service data and performance insights, to inform decisions and guide direction

• Conduct in-depth user research to generate actionable insights and guide decision-making

• Create and iterate prototypes and other design artefacts

• Integrate offline and online service delivery into coherent end-to-end services

• Design and facilitate collaborative workshops with a range of stakeholders and partners

• Evaluate and evidence the impact of service design work

Previous experience in children's services, health, education or related public/third sector contexts is desirable - but if you bring transferable skills, we want to hear from you.

What You'll Get in Return

• 26 days annual leave (rising with service) plus bank holidays

• Access to the Barnardo's pension scheme

• Flexible working and hybrid/remote options

• Wellbeing initiatives and Employee Assistance Programme

• Regular supervision and career development opportunities

• The opportunity to shape how service design is used across a national organisation

• The chance to work on services that support children, young people and families across the UK.

Inclusion and Belonging

We are committed to building a diverse workforce. We particularly welcome applications from disabled candidates, LGBTQ+ people, people from racially minoritised communities, and those with care experience. If there's anything we can do to support you through the application process, please let us know.

Ready to Apply?

Together, we can change childhoods and change lives.

When completing your application please refer to your skills knowledge and experience in relation to the Person Specification and Job Description.

Please note due to the high volume of applications for some posts, this advert might close before the displayed closing date. We recommend that you apply for this role as soon as possible.

Pay & Reward Framework

We know that our colleagues go above and beyond in delivering our vital work, driven by their passion and commitment to Barnardo's values . We also know that we can only realise our ambitions and achieve better outcomes for more children, thanks to the talent, hard work and creativity of our people.

For all these reasons, we are committed to a new approach to pay and reward, to ensure it is fair, attractive and progressive, which was rolled out in April 2023. This is a positive change for the charity, and a part of our People & Culture Strategy. It will assist us in supporting colleagues to belong, thrive and grow in their colleague journey at Barnardo's and in time will offer clear routes of progression for colleagues in both their career and their pay.

Whilst the full pay band and salary range is advertised, our approach to starting salaries is to appoint between the minimum to mid-point of the pay band - this ensures that pay steps are available to reward our colleagues annually based on their contribution to excellence and alignment to our values and behaviours. More details on Barnardo's pay framework can be found upon application.

Benefits

Workplace Offer: What it means for you

Our hybrid working initiative is based on trust, flexibility and empowerment. We understand our workplace offer means different things to different people, and we encourage those conversations. This may mean working at one of our stores, services, working at home, in the community, at one of our Collaboration Hubs or depending on the role any combination of these. Please read through the advert carefully to understand the remits of hybrid working that will be specific to the role.

Barnardo's require colleagues to be UK residents, based in the UK and to complete their roles from within the UK (with the exception of colleagues providing Barnardo's services in Jersey and colleagues who live in the Republic of Ireland providing services in Northern Ireland)

• Barnardo's believe in creating equality of opportunity in the workplace and supporting people to manage their work-life balance; we are therefore open to offering flexible working arrangements.
• Annual Leave entitlement for full-time colleagues is 26 days per annum, increasing to 27 days per annum, after 3 years Barnardo's service, 29 days per annum, after 5 years Barnardo's service and 30 days per annum, after 7 years Barnardo's service. Those working less than full time are entitled to the same level of holiday pro rata
• The ability to buy up to another 5 days annual leave via our Buy Your Leave scheme
• A host of family friendly leave options including company Maternity Paternity and Adoption pay; together with all family additional leave options
• Service related sick pay from day 1
• Access to a Group Personal Pension with a matched 4% or 6% contribution from Barnardo's. Ability to pay via salary sacrifice to garner both tax and NI savings on your own contribution
• Death in service cover of 4x annual earnings for all staff contributing to our Group Personal Pension
• Cycle2work scheme
• Interest free season ticket loans
• Discounts and cashback from at high street shops including major supermarkets, cinemas, gyms, leisure/theme parks, holidays and much more via our Benefit Portal
• 20% discount at Barnardo's stores
• Opportunity to purchase a health cash plan to claim towards dental, glasses, therapy etc
• Free access to round the clock employee assistance program for advice and support
• Access to Barnardo's Learning and Development offer

*T&C's apply based on contract

About Barnardo's

We are committed to being an inclusive employer and cultivating a culture where everyone can belong and thrive through inclusion and connectivity. We want our workforce to be reflective of the communities we work with, and for equality, diversity and inclusion to be embedded in everything we do. We are a Disability Confident Leader, are progressing our ambition to be an anti-racist organisation with Anti-Racism Commitments and actions in place and have networks for colleagues who are disabled, LGBT+, Black and Minoritised Ethnic and Women. We particularly encourage applications from Black and Minoritised Ethnic and/or disabled candidates who are currently underrepresented in our workforce. For disabled applicants, we offer reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process.