Senior Content Designer in Manchester

You’ll join the Home Office’s Policing and Public Protection Technology (PPPT) portfolio as our first senior content specialist, embedded in a central user‑centred design (UCD) team that works across public safety and homeland security. Your initial focus will be on modern slavery, working on services that sit at the intersection of safeguarding, serious crime and victim support. While modern slavery work can sometimes overlap with areas such as migration and borders, this role does not involve migration or borders policy or delivery. Over time, as demand for modern slavery support evolves, you’ll also have opportunities to work on other products and services across the wider PPPT portfolio.

Day‑to‑day, you'll work directly with the Modern Slavery (MSU), improving how a wide range of people – from emergency service workers and voluntary sector staff to those directly affected – navigate and use critical government services. You'll work with researchers and other designers, challenging assumptions, running workshops, and making complex policy actionable. This is also a leadership role. You'll line manage and help develop content practice across the portfolio, setting the standard and enabling others to meet it. Crucially, we need someone who understands complex systems and can think beyond content, someone who can play an active role in shaping the whole design as well as the words. If you want your work to have real impact and help define what good content design looks like, this role is for you.

Job Description

• Scoping, writing and editing content for complex internal and public‑facing services including those relating to public safety and security.
• Working as part of a multidisciplinary team to identify user needs, write and map user stories, design content plans, and co‑design end‑to‑end services, ensuring content is considered at every stage of the design process.
• Identifying and engaging with stakeholders to clarify objectives, constraints and commitments, while focusing on user needs.
• Working with subject matter experts in a sensitive policy area, ensuring content is accurate, trauma‑informed and operationally appropriate.
• Monitoring the performance of content and tools, identifying ways to improve services.
• Line managing, training and mentoring other content designers, and embedding content design practice where it is new to the portfolio.
• Constructively challenging design decisions that don’t meet user needs.
• Helping other team members understand what content design is, why it’s important and how to work with content designers.

UK residency and security requirements

For meaningful security checks to be carried out, individuals need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time. Please note that this role requires Security Check (SC) clearance, which would normally need 5 years’ UK residency in the past 5 years. However, in exceptional circumstances security clearance applications for candidates who have been present in the UK for at least 3 of the last 5 years may be considered. Failure to meet this residency requirement will result in your security clearance application being rejected.