Content Designer vacancy – make a difference to prospective student experiences
We are currently looking for a content designer to join our team. If you’re up to tackling big challenges in a multidisciplinary team focused on user needs, this could be the opportunity for you. Applications close Monday 7 September 2020.
About the position
First up, the fundamentals. If these meet your expectations, it’s worth reading on…
- Grade 6 – £28,331 – £32,816
- 40 days annual leave, excellent pension and other benefits
- Open ended contract, available immediately
- Application deadline: Monday 7 September at 5pm
Content designer vacancy details and application process
Who we are and what we do
We’re a (still fairly) new team to the University, set up to overhaul how we approach provision of online services to prospective students.
This is a massive job in an organisation serving around 40,000 students, where much responsibility has been traditionally devolved to our 22 schools, 3 colleges and numerous support units. So enhancing experiences for students is also about enhancing experiences for the staff who support them.
We’re a multidisciplinary team and place great emphasis on collaboration and co-design:
- Six content designers, plus a senior content designer
- A user experience lead who coordinates our discovery and appraisal work
- A software developer who helps us interact with some complex, business-critical University systems and extend the functionality of the University’s corporate content management system.
And also me… I help colleagues in key services and in our colleges to set our priorities so that the work that we do has maximum impact. I’m committed to taking a human-centred approach to our work so that what we do is well evidenced and achieves the outcomes we seek.
Because a great student experience is also great for the business. Students being successful independently when they use our online services means:
- We get more applications from students of the right calibre
- Those students make the strongest possible applications
- We handle enquiries quickly and efficiently, and don’t need to cover things students could’ve answered for themselves
About this blog and our team profiles
Are you the right fit for us?
You can read the full job description on our job vacancies website, so I’ll not repeat all that here.
I’ll just emphasise a few things that really matter to us:
- You need to be open to learning about our users. We don’t necessarily expect you to be exprienced in human-centred design, but you need to care about whether the content you design really works. Be ready to get involved in user research and analytics to really understand student needs and show how you’ve changed online behaviours.
- You need to be committed to the discipline of content design. Again, you don’t need to know everything but you do need to be ready to challenge and be challenged. Joining a dedicated team of content specialists will bring new opportunities and require editorial discipline. This is less about content creation and more about content curation.
- You need to have a collaborative mindset. I’ve mentioned how we work as a multidisciplinary team, but you also need to be ready to collaborate, support and lead colleagues across the University. We have many, many subject matter experts in a wide range of fields – both academic and administrative – and they need to be brought along with our approach and philosophy. We need you to give colleagues confidence in our expertise and support them in the adoption of new content management processes.
Learn more and apply
I would encourage you to learn more about the team and our work through this blog. If you’ve got any questions about the vacancy, I’m happy to field them via email.
Neil Allison’s contact details
Content designer vacancy details and application process
