The full question

“What would you recommend to mid-level service designers to grow in their career?”

Summary of the video

• Practice service design skills daily

• Choose an area to become an expert in and go deeper

• Meet "cousin" fields (psychology, economics, social sciences, philosophy) to gain new perspectives

• Educate and help the service design community to learn and grow

• Join the co-creation of service design principles at Swiss Innovation Academy

Video transcript

This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.

What would you recommend now to mid level service designers to grow in their career? And here I would recommend. A few things. So these are different things. You don't have to do all of them. Maybe you just have to pick one or the other. One, which I think is quite something which is very interesting, is practice daily.

Find a way to practice your service design skills every day. Because if you're a service designer, obviously, while you're working, you're not doing service design every day. Sometimes you're doing a lot of project management, some other days you're doing a lot of admin tasks, some other days you're just, cleaning your computer.

But just, and that's why I would say find a way to practice every day a little bit of service design. That's the first thing, because that helps you grow. By doing that, you are what you do every day. And if you do everyday service design, you are a service designer. The other tip would be, go deeper. And here, the idea is as follows.

You can choose an area, a topic to go to become the expert. Service design is quite a large thing. And so what part of service design do you want to become like deep nerdy? Is it maybe one part of the process? Oh, I want to be super good at ideation. Okay. Go deeper in that. Or, oh, I want to be the academic nerd.

I want to read every paper about service design. Or you might say, hey, I'm going to be the one that knows every tool, every digital thing. Cool. Do that. So the thing here is go deeper. Select something, one area that you're passionate about and invest a lot of time to explore that deeper and become the expert in that tiny bit of service design.

Then, another way to do it to improve your skills and to grow as a mid level service designer is to meet the cousins. So what do I mean with that is go out and meet other fields that are quite near. That's why they're called cousins, but that aren't directly services. That can be psychology.

Behavioral Economics, Social Sciences, Philosophy and then get an introduction to these fields and get interested in these fields or one of these fields so that then you rediscover some of the basics of your own field, but from another lens. And you'll get new skills, new point of views that you then can add to your world.

So basically you will not be anymore just a service designer, but you will be a service designer for an eye for economics. Oh, or you will be a service designer who has a deep understanding of system thinking. Ah, okay, that's where, how you can profile yourself as a mid level service designer.

And obviously one thing that you can do to grow and help the community is to educate and help the community. Because what we know is the more you teach stuff, the more you also learn what you teach. So by being part of the community sharing your skills, sharing what you have learned, sharing the challenges that you have, you always become so a better service designer.

So obviously there is a lot, a few communities out there, and there is also one on the on the Swiss Innovation Academy, where you can co create service design principles. If you want to join that one, obviously you are more than welcome to do

A community question

This question was asked by a community member for the second Service Design webinar. You can rewatch the full webinar for free with all the show notes and slides.

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The transcript of the video was made using Descript, and the summary was made by using Notion.ai and the automated transcript with the prompt: "Make a summary with bullet points"