Job description
Head of profession for design
Grade G6 HoP
Role responsibilities
A Head of profession for design is an expert practitioner with broad industry experience, who can define and assure best practice while influencing, leading and mentoring others.
At this role level, you will:
- influence both design and organisational strategy and priorities
- collaborate with counterpart colleagues across government
- focus on ensuring the right conditions and environment for designers to work effectively
Vision and strategic leadership
- set the vision and strategy for the profession across the department
- collaborate with the wider department to ensure that the vision for the profession aligns to the wider needs of the department
- create a plan and roadmap to build and strengthen the professional capability and excellence
- work across government and the sector to ensure a cohesive approach for the profession, creating opportunities for collaboration through existing networks or setting up new networks where they don't exist
- hold authority to ensure that specialists are able to contribute towards building the profession and participate in communities, backed by DDT Committee
- raise the profile of the profession across the department
- develop an attraction and retention strategy, to grow professional capability in the department
Skills you need
Expert practitioner
- is the expert practitioner in their field, with a high level of knowledge and experience of current and new methodologies/strategies/technologies/techniques and a track record of delivery
- retains an element of practice of their profession to keep their skills sharp and to work towards strategic departmental objectives. For example, unblocking delivery, product strategies, content strategies, architectural designs and patterns, etc.
Community
- develop professional communities to support our people to grow, establish professional standards and consistency, support rapid delivery through sharing and learning from one another
- work cross-government and externally to build connections into professional communities
- work with other Heads of Profession on cross-cutting objectives, and in related professions within their job family
Quality and standards
- create accessible knowledge, standards and practice, to set good conditions for people in their professions to work effectively, and ensuring they are well enforced through service assessments
- be the guardian of quality and standards of the practitioners within the profession, owning and setting the principles and policies of the profession
- lead by example in the application of standards
- grow the assessor pool in the profession, to assure service delivery and build profession sustainability
People
- build and grow a forward-thinking and diverse team within the profession
- build the professional capability across the department
- define the competency, professional practice, skills profile and expertise expectations at different grades across the profession
- set the approach for recruitment, onboarding, retention, graduate pipelines, diversification
- develop the capability framework for professional development of people in their specialism, and tracking capability
Organisational delivery
- establish close relationships with all delivery teams to understand their needs and challenges, and to be able to identify areas of profession-related join-up*
- provide advice and consultation for the senior leadership team on questions relating to the profession
- provide consulting support for programmes with performance issues or where a particular specialism is lacking or causing delivery issues
- feed up-to-date capability information into the workforce plan
- make evidenced based decisions on the tools, platforms, services and content that best supports professions across the department
*Responsibility for delivery or a role in making business decisions is not explicitly included. This may differ by profession.