Hi there! In this video, I'm answering a question from Zsóka who asks: What are the top three important skills to learn as a service designer?

It's a tough question because obviously, there are so many skills and every service designer is different and every service design job is different as well.

But I'm going to list three skills that I think are sometimes overlooked and that are in my experience extremely important and that are not service design skills but that are so important when you do service design work.

And the first one I would mention is project management because a lot of the work that I do as a service designer is just you know handling projects and making it possible to go to Kind of a service design moment, which could be a workshop or research or something like that.

But before I can do that service design work, I need to do a lot of project management, which means contacting people, sending emails, sending reminders, being on top of my task. So I think there, this is a scale that, that is like one of the most important because if you manage your project, then people are more willing to work with you, which is one of the most important things in the service design world, which is our work is to help to work with others and therefore, showing that we manage well our projects, It makes people willing to work with us.

And so project management will be like the first one. It's a super boring thing. It's one thing that is very administrative and that you will hate, but it's one of the most important, I think.

The second one, which is also one that I hate. But what I have to learn a lot more is politics and lobbying, especially in big organizations.

You always have to, not just deliver the work, but prepare the people about the work that is being done. And that's, the political side, being able to have coffees with people outside of the emails, outside of the meetings, to ask them questions, prepare them about what's happening, what's working and what's happening.

And, also knowing who are the power people, who are the key influencers in your organization, and then, being friends with them, knowing what's important for them. So that you can, make their life easier and then they can give you back by making your life easier. Politics and lobbying, not the easiest skills to learn, but I think one maybe one of the most important skills and it's really the one that I'm struggling with.

And I think that's it also, but that I'm learning a lot for these days. And, I think also this topic of negotiation here is something that people could explore.

One of the last skills I will mention, if I could only three that I think that are extremely important for service designers is.

Visual communication, and that's one that I had the chance to learn in my previous job where I learned first graphic design and I see that this gives me an edge compared to other service designers who struggle a lot, with visualization, with visualizing ideas and also, communicating ideas, because a lot of our work as a service designer, then there's will have sometimes a visual thing happen.

Be it, a workshop report, a research report a service blueprint, anything a lot of the work that we do ends up being summarized in a visual form. And that's why I think, being good. In graphic design, skills is something that is extremely important.

And that's maybe the ugly truth about service design, which is You know, it's not so much about service design, but much more about, packaging the work that you do as a service designer that matters, which means, doing the research is great, doing a great blueprint. That's great doing great workshops.

That's great. But you need to be able to manage a project so that people are willing to do some work with you. Project Management you need to be able, to motivate people in the backstage so that they then agree to these ideas, politics and lobbying, and you need to be able that to communicate your ideas in a way that people say, wow, this is something that I want.

And that's where visual communications comes in. So the ugly truth, but I hope this give you also an idea of.

So there are a lot of new skills that you could learn, and there are plenty of resources online to learn these skills. So Google, Project Management, Politics, Lobbying and Visual Communications, and you can learn a lot that will help you in your service design journey.

Thanks again for the questions and have a lovely day. Cheers.