Our diverse and inclusive culture reflects the society we live in. This helps us to achieve better outcomes for all our users. See what our team have to say here

We work in multi-disciplinary teams using Agile methods to innovate and radically improve services that:
• Raise education standards and provide the best start in life for children
• Support disadvantaged and vulnerable children and young people
• Drive economic growth

You can read more about our strategy on the DfE digital and technology strategy blog.

About the teams

You will work on the Get into Teaching and Becoming a Teacher service line, where we’re transforming how people consider teaching as a career choice, apply for training, and then become teachers. As part of this transformation, we’ve brought services in-house to improve our users’ experiences and enable us to better inform policy decisions.

The services you could be working on include: Get Into Teaching or Find postgraduate teacher training courses

We’re looking for people who are passionate about encouraging great people to become teachers. We want people who believe that how you work is as important as what you deliver.

You will be responsible for planning and conducting research to meet the needs of your team. You will take responsibility for delivering research but do so collaboratively. You’ll be placed in teams where you will be challenged and able to grow, alongside coaching conversations to support your development.

You will be welcomed into an active user research community of over 100 colleagues across the department.

Main Responsibilities:

You will:

• Plan, design, prepare and run a range of user research activities to support the design, development and continuous improvement of digital products and services, and to inform policy development and iteration.
• Carry out research activities, from recruiting participants, preparing discussion guides and moderating research sessions, to leading analysis of research data and delivering clear and actionable findings.
• Design and run contextual and discovery research to develop a deep understanding of the needs of all users of a service.
• Advocate for inclusive research and design, and conduct research with a diverse range of users to ensure that our services are usable and accessible for everyone.
• Collaborate with insight and analysis colleagues in your team and wider DfE to build up a rich picture of our users and how and why they use our services.
• Work closely with the multidisciplinary team to turn user research findings into stories and actions that lead to valuable product and service designs that meet users’ needs.
• Ensure research is shareable and traceable through appropriate and transparent research data analysis and synthesis of findings.
• Effectively communicate user research findings to the team and the wider organisation to help develop empathy for our users and inform evidence-based decisions (including presentations at show-and-tells, designing, maintaining and sharing research outputs and artefacts, and creating research reports).
• Help embed a culture of team involvement in user research, team analysis, design rationale and decision-making based on user needs.
• Actively contribute to the user research community within DfE and across government.

  For further information on what we expect from a User Researcher, please click here

• Strategic insight: Proven ability to understand the complex problems a team or service is trying to solve as well as organisational strategy and objectives, and ability to align user research activities to inform the team’s decision-making.
• Research skills: Strong understanding and experience of a range of user research methodologies and their strengths and limitations, and the ability to choose appropriate research methods for different situations and service/product development phases.
• Analysis and synthesis: Experience of helping teams to understand and adopt a range of research methods and analysis techniques.
• Inclusive research: Strong understanding of the diversity of users of government services and the need to make services usable and accessible for everyone, and experience researching with users with access needs.
• User centered and agile practices: Proven experience of working in multidisciplinary teams to embed user-centred design practices (including identifying and advocating for what users need) and to deliver continuous research.
• Ability and experience in using research findings to create impact within an organisation and to influence decision making within service teams and at senior levels.
• Experience of advocating for user research and engaging sceptical colleagues and stakeholders in research.
• A good understanding of the social and technological context of government services.