I have always had a creative side, studying art and design and product design in secondary school. I worked on projects that included designing for an East African remittance company, an e-commerce website and a service that helps young adults find work in Somalia. I wrote a little on how I found my junior role during the pandemic here and now I have recently started my mid-weight designer role, yay! Before MoJ, I worked as a user experience (UX) designer at a startup company. I joined the Ministry of Justice in Nov 2020 as a junior interaction designer. When a secondment opportunity came up for a junior role, I jumped at the chance to apply and here I am now, a year later in a permanent mid-weight role. I realised I had many transferable skills that could be applied to an Interaction Designer role. With the support of another designer, I began to curate a portfolio of examples of how I’d been using the principles of design in both my work as a Data Strategy Manager and during my apprenticeship. It was often challenging to juggle both my off-the-job learning and my day-to-day work responsibilities, but I am very grateful as it led me to Interaction Design! About halfway through my apprenticeship, I realised that I had a much greater interest in designing user interfaces than full-stack development. It took 18 months, but I successfully passed my apprenticeship in February 2022. I applied and was accepted onto a Software Engineering course. At first I was nervous about applying, but MoJ apprenticeships are available to everyone, with no age or grade restrictions.

It became an activity I looked forward to in the evenings, so I decided to look for learning opportunities where I could expand on these skills through work and I found out about apprenticeships. I spent my evenings learning basic html and realised I really enjoyed futzing around with layouts, colours and fonts. I went to university to study English Literature with grand plans of working in publishing-getting paid to read felt like a job that was too good to be true! But after graduation I found myself in data strategy roles, first in the banking sector and then at the Ministry of Justice.ĭuring the pandemic, I decided to design a website for my mum’s business as a project to keep me busy while I was stuck inside. This post will tell you a bit about how we each made our career changes happen and why we love what we do. We’ll be talking more about the buddy group in the next post in this series. We’ve developed a buddy group to support each other, building on the wider support we’ve received from others in the MoJ user-centred design community.

We are four early-career designers at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ).

In the company of women kate christie