Research and Design “School”. The Opportunity Gap.
Hey. We’re Tayo, Tope and Amelia. A group of people passionate about championing equity in research and design.
We’ve spent the last few months working towards a concept and prototype for a new “School” to nurture a future generation of Black researchers and designers. This blog series documents our journey
BLOG FIVE: Roles and Recruiters.
For those of you who read the last blog you may remember that we had planned to do a mini audit of open job roles and host a round of one on one “recruiter” conversations. We’re well on our way with these now (with a few conversations to go) so we wanted to share with you what we’ve learned.
ONE: There are more researcher jobs than design ones.
We did a broad but deep sweep of roles over two days (like a little job searcher auto ethnography). We found about 50% less Designer jobs than Researcher jobs, spread across governments, charities, funders and corporates. There were also more open roles in Design within the corporate sector.
TWO: The majority of open roles right now are ‘mid -senior’ level.
During our broad sweep, which went perhaps deeper than the average job seeker could or would, we found 25 roles across 22 orgs, though there are definitely more. Of those, 4 were junior, 15 were mid-weight, 4 were senior and 1 was for a leadership role. As we started to speak with employers we heard that this current high demand for mid-senior researchers and designers is often being fuelled by clients, funders, complex demands and the lack of internal capacity for training and support of more junior employees.
THREE: Research and design can be lucrative.
Many of the roles we found in our research didn’t include salaries or salary bands (we don’t love that). Within the roles which did include salaries, we saw yearly full time salaries between £28k and £70K. We also know anecdotally that freelancers can bring in between £200 and £900 per day depending on experience and sector. Mostly all above average for the UK.
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FOUR: People can now get and progress in mid-senior roles more quickly.
In the current market there’s high demand, so competition for awesome people is fierce. We’ve heard that because of this roles are increasingly being filled by candidates with less experience than they traditionally would have. People are also progressing quickly to fill needs within their organisations. So perhaps there’s never been a better time to enter the field. There’s an interesting blog about this phenomenon here.
FIVE: Black people know about and want to get into these roles.
We’ve heard that there is an abundance of Black people seeking out and applying for Research and Design roles. One team we spoke to ran a recent recruitment process for a mid level role. Through a really strong and equitable process, they reached a massive candidate pool made up almost entirely of Black and Brown folks. Proof, echoed in our own recruitment drive for the co-design session, that our future designers are out there!
SIX: Black people aren’t yet winning in this demand boom.
In the current job market, less experience should no longer be a massive barrier to landing your dream role. The fact that there are jobs available, Black people available to fill them, and there is a sector wide move to allow people to grow into roles, this should be the perfect time for EVERYONE to shine. However anecdotal evidence suggests there are still not enough Black people landing these mid level and senior roles.
The people we spoke to suggested that organisations often don’t feel ready or equipped to support Black employees and that they don’t see the Black people who are applying for these roles “selling their skills/experience” or confidently navigating the recruitment processes well. They’ve also suggested that they are giving less weight to affordable / free self-serve training courses found online which many people (Black people included) have used to build the base of their CVs.
We think these insights are as exciting and promising as they are challenging and troubling. There’s a massive opportunity brewing and it appears that talented Black humans are at risk of missing out.
We’re keen to hear your thoughts on what we’ve shared and to hash this all out in our co-design session next week.
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That’s it from us. Thanks for reading. As ever, if anything resonates or you want to explore a collaboration please do get in touch.
This work is housed by Hello Brave and funded by Impact on Urban Health.
