How to become an SDN-accredited service design practitioner

Read how Sophie achieved SDN Service Design Practitioner Accreditation

Sophie Jones is the Head of Employer Support for Social Care Wales. In 2024, she completed Service Design in Practice training course. Since then, she has become the seventh of our alumni to gain Service Design Network SDN Practitioner Accreditation.

She’s now officially an SDN Accredited Service Design Practitioner – congratulations, Sophie! 👏

We spoke to Sophie about her experience of becoming accredited and her tips for others going through the process.

What is SDN Accreditation?

The SDN is the leading international non-profit institution for expertise in service design. As well as their events, publications and networking programmes, they offer an Accreditation Programme that provides independent certification confirming competency in service design. 

There are three levels for individual accreditation:

• Practitioner Accreditation (min. 12 months experience, or completion of qualifying course)

• Professional Accreditation (min. 2 years experience)

• Master Accreditation (min. 5 years experience)

What are the benefits of accreditation?

SDN Practitioner Accreditation shows that you’ve met established criteria and a level of expertise in service design – and that this has been independently validated. Sophie says:

“For me, it was nice to have the accreditation to say I have got the skills to do this. I haven't just read about it, I'm doing it, applying the actual skills. [The course] was a lot of work, and I know we're all adults, but it's sometimes nice to get the little gold sticker!”

How does Service Design in Practice support accreditation?

Service Works is one of only two SDN Accredited Organisations providing service design training in the UK, and the only one focused on working with government and not-for-profit organisations. 

That makes Service Design in Practice the only accredited pathway to SDN Service Design Practitioner Accreditation, specifically created for public sector organisations. 

The course’s focus on real-world application is part of how it supports SDN accreditation. Sophie says: 

“[Accreditation] highlights that it wasn't just another training course. We all do training courses, which you walk away from and never think about again. I didn't feel like that with Service Design in Practice. As we were going through, I was using things that we were doing [on the course].”

As well as this, when you complete the Service Works Service Design in Practice course, you’ll get a 50% discount code to use for SDN accreditation.

The process for getting SDN accredited

There are three steps to accreditation after completing Service Design in Practice:

1.Submit your professional CV

You’ll need an updated CV that includes your education and training in service design (including the Service Design in Practice course), as well as your job role(s).

In Sophie’s case, her job role isn’t specifically ‘service designer’, though, as a service manager, service design is a strong theme in her role:

“Your CV has to show how you are using service design. So it was quite useful for me to rewrite my CV and think about it from a service design perspective. Sometimes when you're just doing the job, you don't think of yourself as a service designer. But everything that the team I manage does is about putting the user in the centre. So that was a really good exercise.” 

2. Write up a service design case study

You’ll submit a written case study on a service design project. A key component of the Service Design in Practice course is a group challenge that involves working on a real-world service design challenge. This can be the basis for your case study. As Sophie explains:

“At the end of the course, we did our final presentation, where our group presented our project. Afterwards, Jo and Ffion provided the template for the SDN case study, so it was a case of looking through what we'd presented and developing that into a case study. 

For our project, we’d ended up doing a really robust discovery around youth participation in another group member’s organisation. We'd done empathy mapping from in-depth interviews and observations with volunteers, then, based on the evidence, we developed personas. So all of that went into the case study. I had to bring it all together, show what we'd done and demonstrate what skills and techniques we used. 

The case study gets peer reviewed by three examiners, so it took six-to-eight weeks to find out if I’d passed.”

Sophie with some of the other course participants

3. Take an online exam

The final step in accreditation is an online exam consisting of 35 multiple-choice questions.

“Although the exam is multiple-choice, it's one of those multiple choices where the answers are really similar. So I was really glad that I'd re-read everything from the course beforehand. You get the results straight away, so those marks stand and then it’s combined with the review of your CV and case study before you get your final result.”

Tips on making accreditation easier

Sophie has some other tips for making the accreditation process easier:

“If you can, don't leave it too long after you’ve finished the course. When you're doing the course, and you're meeting every week and doing your presentation, it's so fresh in your mind. In hindsight, I would have just kept those Friday mornings [which were set aside for the course] free for a couple more weeks. Then I would have completed the accreditation much more quickly.”

Not everyone will get it done straight away, though, as Sophie can attest to: 

“Life does get in the way and, as it happened, it was around a year after completing the course that I went through the accreditation. If that’s you, definitely reread your course notes before you do the exam, because that was really helpful. In preparation for the exam, I went back through the notes I’d made when Jo and Ffion had set reading with questions. I also went back to the book provided with the course, so all the terms were fresh in my mind.

Although the exam was open book, it helped that I’d prepared well beforehand, because otherwise it would have taken much longer to complete.”

Find out more about gaining SDN Practitioner Accreditation via the Service Design in Practice course.

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