United States: What's the state of Service Design in the US?



Jessica Leitch shared on Linkedin a 2022 paper called The State of Service Design in the US 2022. 

Here a few of the learnings that stuck with me: 
  1. A high percentage of service design practitioners are not working in service design roles
  2. Service designers are still training themselves on the job or through reading
  3. 99% of new Service Design graduates from SCAD were hired within
    one year of graduation.
  4. 41% of service designers work in-house, 30% in an agency, 13% in the public sector, 8% are freelancers, 5% teach it and 3% do it in some other form.

Where do US service designer work?

 Chris Risdon a Service Designer in the United States did a  a little piece of informal research to better understand where do US based service designers work. 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:

  1. About half of the service designers seem to work within a digital department or company that focuses on digital
  2. About a third of service designers are in agencies
  3. A large majority of in-house service designers not sitting in a digital organization are in healthcare
  4. On the in-house side of things, Capital One and Truist Bank seem to be the biggest employers of service designers.
  5. On the agency side, Fjord and Harmonic design seem to be the biggest employers of service designers. 

More details can be found here about where do Service Designers work?

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