Content Designer

Expected Timeline (subject to change)

Sift - week commencing 21st September 2026

The Content Design team is part of the User Centred Design team in Digital Delivery and Change Division. The Content Design team is responsible for the design and delivery of content for all our benefits. We work on continuous improvement projects and support business as usual activities. The team is multi-disciplinary and brings together a vast range of skills and expertise to ensure that clients are at the centre of the design and development of all our content design.

Content designers make things easier for people to understand and use. They make sure the appropriate content is shown to users in the right place and in the best format. This can involve creating, evaluating, updating and reviewing content at all stages of the end-to-end journey of a service (across digital and offline channels) to help users complete their goal and government deliver a policy intent.

• be comfortable using evidence, data and research to make content decisions.
• build relationships across government to focus on the needs of the user and to influence stakeholders.
• contribute to and use the style guides and content patterns.
• engage with and contribute to the Scottish Government content design community of practice.

• Work in agile teams and help them to manage and visualise outcomes, prioritise work, define scope and agree a minimum viable product (MVP). Adapt, reflect and be responsive to feedback.
• Create prototypes and content plans to demonstrate proposed approaches to content design. Explain how the pattern choice, publishing approach and metadata will shape how the content will be published and managed.
• Prioritise and build relationships with stakeholders. Communicating with them in various ways to build consensus on content design approaches that balance the needs of the business and user.
• Establish and iterate content patterns and standards. Contribute to the creation and development of content strategies and processes.
• Create and iterate content for end-to-end services that makes complex language and processes easy to understand. Record design decisions and design debt. Provide evidence and acceptance criteria for design decisions that show how the content meets user needs.
• Use data, research and evidence to plan, write, design and edit content across multiple channels that meets content styles and standards. Set review dates and monitor the effectiveness of content to make continuous improvements.
• Engage with and contribute to the Scottish Government content design community of practice.

We use an assessment framework called 'Success Profiles' which lists the elements we test and provides detailed descriptions of each. Find out more about the framework here.

For this post, the following Success Profile elements will be assessed:

• Experience of creating accessible, user-centred content.
• Experience of turning complex information and processes into clear, easy-to-understand content that provides users with the right information in the right format.
• Experience of adapting communication styles to engage different audiences and build positive relationships with stakeholders.
• Experience of using content management systems to create, manage and maintain digital content.

• Communicating and Influencing
  - Level 3
• Working Together
  - Level 3

You can find out more about Success Profiles Behaviours here.

This role is aligned to Content Designer within the Government Digital and Data Profession.

These skills will be tested during the Technical Assessment if you are successful at sift stage. They will not be assessed at application stage. Please…