About the job

Job summary

Are you a dedicated person who is passionate about making a difference?

Would you like to work for the Ministry of Defence? 

Defence Business Services (DBS) is one of the largest shared service organisations in Europe that provides a wide range of corporate services, to over 1.2 million end users, including serving and past military and families, as well as MoD civil servants and industry. DBS delivers large scale administration and smaller specialist services to enable the wider MOD to focus on its core aims, maintaining the UK’s Defence and Security. Services include Human Resources, Pay, Veterans, Finance and Procurement.

• Our Vision - To support UK defence customers with outstanding service every time.
• Our Mission - Together we will proudly support Defence, continuously improving and delivering flexible, timely, sustainable and value for money services that underpin the whole force and enhance operational capability. 

DBS is committed to creating a great place to work for all our colleagues. We are building an inclusive culture and respectful environment that reflects the diversity of the society. 

We want to maximise the potential of everyone who chooses to work for us through opportunities to develop your skills and experience. We also offer a range of flexible working patterns and support to make a fulfilling career accessible to you and offer a Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%. Where your role permits, we support a blended working approach alternatively known as hybrid working.

DBS has recently undertaken a review of its operational locations in the North West, and have consolidated all activities in Norcross, Blackpool. A further move, to the new Government Hub at Talbot Gateway in Blackpool, is scheduled to take place in 2026. 

Come and join the DBS community today!

Job description

This role is to design end-to-end journey of services across Defence Business Services.  Services include public facing transactions on www.gov.uk such as ‘Apply for a deceased person’s military record’. You will also design products and content across digital and off-line channels and internal digital forms and products provided to all staff in the Ministry of Defence.

The post-holder will work collaboratively with service team members including development, analytics and user research as well as working closely with internal and external stakeholders and will create, or change, transactions, products and content to meet user needs and organisation outcomes.

As a Service Designer you will:

•    Support the design and implementation of services, strategies and policies to advocate for user needs whilst ensuring business requirements are being met.
•    Advocate for inclusive, collaborative and user centred service design practices.
•    Advise on the tools and methods for service design.
•    Work within cross-functional teams and collaborate with stakeholders, and partners to identify user needs and design solutions that meet those needs.
•    Champion design for users for whom assisted digital and/or accessibility technologies are required to access a service.
•    Prototype and validate proposed designs using a variety of prototyping tools (including strong prototyping in code including HTML, CSS & JavaScript)
•    Have responsibility for service design across complex services, ensuring services solve the whole problem for users and meet both user needs and policy intent.
•    Identity and understand constraints, communicate these and work within them (including challenging the validity of constraints where appropriate whilst ensuring standards are being met).
•    Help identify high level needs and epics to influence the product roadmap and how the backlog is prioritised.
•    Map the experience of users and highlight areas where it can be improved.
•    Explore ways of simplifying complex end-to-end processes for digital and non-digital journeys 
•    Promote the value of service design across the organisation.

Person specification

Essential experience required: 

•    Service design, with proven ability to develop evidence and context based design
•    Building positive relationships, engaging with, and influencing, stakeholders to deliver outcomes
•    Introducing positive change into working practices, teams or organisations
•    Strong understanding of the GOV.UK design system and prototyping kit with the ability to prototype in code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
•    Experience of working to the government service standard and/or GOV.UK standards and working practices
•    Excellent planning and organisational skills and the ability to prioritise to meet deadlines and cope with fluctuations in workload
•    Designing accessible, usable services that are based on meeting user needs, across multiple products and channels
•    Helping teams understand the wider context of a design project or product
•    Working in an agile, multi-disciplinary and collaborative environment

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £43,080, Ministry of Defence contributes £11,631 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours, Experience and Technical skills.

Please ensure that at the application and interview stages of the campaign you review the Success Profiles Framework to assist you in the demonstration of your skills and experience.

Your suitability for the role will be assessed using the Success Profile elements that have been chosen for this campaign. Each element will be scored accordingly, and the successful candidate will be appointed on merit.

Applications will be sifted on all Success Profile elements, but in the event of a high number of applications, an initial sift will be conducted on the following success profile elements:

Primary: Technical - Senior service designer - Evidence and context-based design

Secondary: Technical - Senior service designer - Prototyping

In this instance the remaining elements will be tested at interview.

At application stage you will be assessed against the following:

• Technical - Senior service designer - Evidence and context-based design
• Technical - Senior service designer - Prototyping
• Technical - Senior service designer - User focus
• Technical - Senior service designer - Community collaboration
• Experience - CV
• Experience - Personal statement - Please provide information of how you meet the criteria set out in the job description. You may wish to further include examples of how you have tackled similar tasks or demonstrated the skills outlined in the job advert. 

At interview 1 stage you will be assessed against the following:

• Experience - Personal statement
• Behaviour - Leadership
• Behaviour - Communicating and Influencing

Those that pass the minimum score criteria will then be invited to Interview 2 where you will be assessed on the following for the application and the Digital Skills Allowance Assessment:

• Technical - Senior service designer - Evidence and context-based design
• Technical - Senior service designer - Prototyping
• Technical - Senior service designer - User focus
• Technical - Senior service designer - Community collaboration

In the rare case where individuals have exact matching scores, the order of merit will be determined based on the behaviour scores at interview in the following order:

• 1 - Technical - Senior service designer - Evidence and context-based design
• 2 - Technical - Senior service designer - Prototyping
• 3 - Technical - Senior service designer - User focus
• 4 - Technical - Senior service designer - Community collaboration
• 5 - Experience - Personal statement
• 6 - Behaviour - Leadership
• 7 - Behaviour - Communicating and Influencing

If candidate scores are still exact, the merit order will then be determined on the sift score in the following order:

• 1 - Technical - Senior service designer - Evidence and context-based design
• 2 - Technical - Senior service designer - Prototyping
• 3 - Technical - Senior service designer - User focus
• 4 - Technical - Senior service designer - Community collaboration
• 5 - Experience - CV
• 6 - Experience - Personal statement

We want to offer opportunities to all who are successful at interview for our roles, but this isn’t always possible, so we do hold candidates on an active reserve list for 12 months. – this will need amending to 3 months for internal or across government roles

Application sifting is scheduled to take place in mid January.

Interviews 1 and 2 are currently taking place remotely via Ms Teams and will be conducted late January.

A minimum of 2 full working days’ notice will be provided for interviews.We endeavour to stick to these dates, but these are subject to change around business needs.

To assist with your application please find attached below: 

1.     DBS Candidate Information Guide -   Working for Defence Business Services - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

2.     Technical framework - https://ddat-capability-framework.service.gov.uk/index.html

The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equality of opportunity. There is a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.  

If you need to advise us that you need additional help or reasonable adjustments for the recruitment process, please contact: DBS-EnhancedRecruitmentTeam@mod.gov.uk 

MOD Recruitment Satisfaction Survey – we may contact you regarding your experience to help us improve our customer satisfaction. The survey is voluntary and anonymous. You may however be given the opportunity to provide additional information to help us improve our service which includes the collection of some personal data as defined by the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR). The MOD Privacy Notice sets out how we will use your personal data and your rights.

As a result of the changes to the UK immigration rules which came into effect on 1 January 2021, the Ministry of Defence will only offer sponsorship for a skilled worker visa under the points-based system, where a role has been deemed to be business critical. 
The role currently being advertised has not been assessed as business critical and is therefore NOT open to applications from those who will require sponsorship under the points-based system. Should you apply for this role and be found to require sponsorship, your application will be rejected, and any provisional offer of employment withdrawn. 

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window). People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.