The "2022 Service Design Salary Report" from the Service Design Jobs website has a few elements that can help us answer this question. Within that survey that was focused on the salary of Service Designers, there were a few additional context questions.
So for example, we can see that from the people who answered that survey
The biggest group of service designers is in very large companies
Consulting is the industry that hires the most service designers
There is only a minority of freelancer service designers, and almost half and half work either in a agency or in house
Another take on this question is a little piece of informal research done by Chris Risdon a Service Designer in the United States. He looked at the first 200 people with the "service designer" he could find on Linkedin. Here's what I learned from this research that is focused on the United States:
About half of the service designers seem to work within a digital department or company that focuses on digital
About a third of service designers are in agencies
A large majority of in-house service designers not sitting in a digital organization are in healthcare
On the in-house side of things, Capital One and Truist Bank seem to be the biggest employers of service designers.
On the agency side, Fjord and Harmonic design seem to be the biggest employers of service designers.
The consultancy Fjord did a survey of Service Designers working in the United States and here is what they found out about which industries apply Service Design. Thanks to Jessica Leitch for sharing an excerpt of this study in a public linkedin comment.
