Head of profession

The role

The head of profession is responsibility for:

• vision and strategic leadership
• being an expert design practioner
• developing the design community
• ensuring quality and standards
• developing people and capability
• supporting organisational delivery

The current head of profession

The current head of profession for design is Andy Jones.

Vision and strategic leadership

• Setting the vision and strategy for the design 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.
• Creating a plan and roadmap to build and strengthen the professional capability and excellence.
• Working across government and the sector to ensure a cohesive approach to the specialism, create 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 DDaT Committee.
• Raising the profile of the profession across the department
• Develop an attraction and retention strategy, to grow professional capability in the department

Expert practitioner

• Is the expert practitioner in their field with a high level of knowledge 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

• Developing professional communities to support our people to grow, establish standards and consistency, support rapid delivery through sharing and learning from one another
• Working cross Government and externally to build connections into professional communities
• Working with other Heads of Profession in related professions within their job family

Quality and standards

• Creating 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
• Being the guardian of quality and standards of the practitioners within the profession and 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

• Building and growing a forward thinking and diverse team within the profession
• Building the professional capability across the department
• Define the competency, professional practice, skills profile, and expertise expectations at different grades across the profession
• Setting approach for recruitment, onboarding, retention, graduate pipelines, diversification and developing the framework for professional development of people in their specialism
• Develop the framework for professional development of people in their specialism and tracking capability

Organisational Delivery

• Establishing close relationships with all delivery teams to understand their needs and challenges and to be able to identify areas of profession related join-up
• Advising and consulting for the senior management team on questions relating to the profession
• Providing 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.
• Making evidenced based decisions on the best tools, platforms, services, and content which supports the professions across the department.