Change your career, change lives
The Open University is the UK’s largest university, a world leader in flexible part-time education combining a mission to widen access to higher education with research excellence, transforming lives through education. Find out more about us and our mission by watching this short video (you will be taken to YouTube by clicking this link).
About the Role
This role sits within Digital Services which is aligned with the Digital, Data and Design Profession which provides for communities of practice which supports professional development. The focus of this role will be to support the creation and management of user centred content across services and products to ensure the best possible outcomes for our users.
The Open University is evolving how we improve our services – embedding a service led, agile and user-centred approach.
Key Responsibilities
As a Content Designer at The Open University, you will:
- Collaborate in a multi-disciplinary service team to reduce complexity and improve service outcomes.
- Create, improve and manage user-centred content across a whole service, ensuring usability, accessibility, accuracy and consistency.
- Provide content design and editorial support to other team members, for example in documenting and sharing work and ideas.
- Identify, collaborate effectively with and influence stakeholders and subject matter experts.
- Plan and manage content tasks, from writing user stories to detailed content plans, collaborating where needed.
- Identify the needs of users using analytics, user feedback, user research and other sources of information, to inform content design decisions.
- Be an active member of the Open University’s User Centred Design Community of Practice, contributing to our collective knowledge and skills, and joining up to make the design of our content and services more consistent.
- Help to establish, maintain and improve team processes, templates, guidelines standards to ensure content design consistency and best practice across style, accessibility, and usability.
- Contribute to, influence and share knowledge and best practice and support internal stakeholders across the OU on content design, including content management standards and content style guide.
- Plan and deliver content design work across your service area, while also managing BAU or unplanned content support work.
- Keep up to date in developments in user centred design, content design, trends and technologies, and share with the wider content design team to build a deep understanding and appreciation of best practice in this field.
About You
- Have experience in designing, prototyping, improving, and publishing user-centred content.
- Have experience of using data and evidence to understand user needs, monitor content performance and identify ways to improve the service.
- Be able to demonstrate an understanding of user centred design principles.
- Have an appreciation for accessibility and usability requirements in the design and delivery of user centred content.
- Have good communication skills, and be able to explain ideas in a way that other people understand.
- Have experience and enjoy collaborating with content designers and other disciplines.
- Have experience working with content management systems.
- Have experience working at pace while ensuring attention to detail and continuous improvement.
- Show commitment to continuous personal development of the knowledge and skills related to content design.
- Show commitment to equality and diversity, which is key to fulfilling the University’s mission to be open to people, places, methods and ideas.
- Welcome the constructive criticism of their work and be able to constructively review the work of others.
- Be interested in representing content design at internal and external events.
- Show initiative and be curious about how things work, and why, asking the right sorts of questions and challenging assumptions to unpack complex problems and generate creative solutions.
Support with your application
If you have any questions, or need support or adjustments relating to your application, the recruitment process, or the role, please contact us on 01908 541111 or email careers@open.ac.uk quoting the advert reference number.
What's in it for you?
We are open to discussions about flexible working. Whether it’s a job share, part time, compressed hours or another working arrangement. Please reach out to us to discuss what works best for you.
It is anticipated that a hybrid working pattern can be adopted for this role, where the successful candidate can work from home and the office. However, as this role is contractually aligned to our Milton Keynes office it is expected that some attendance in the office will be required when necessary and in response to business needs. We’d expect this to be approximately once per month.
Flexible working
We are open to discussions about flexible working. Whether it’s a job share, part time, compressed hours or another working arrangement. Please reach out to us to discuss what works best for you.
Next steps in the Recruitment process
We anticipate that interviews for this role will be taking place online via Microsoft Teams during the week commencing 12 January 2026.
Early closing date notification
We may close this job advert earlier than the published closing date where a satisfactory number of applications are received. We would therefore encourage early applications.
How to apply
To apply for this role please submit the following documents:
- CV
- A supporting statement of up to 1000 words. You should set out in your statement why you are interested in the role and provide examples of where your skills and experience meet the essential requirments for this role as detailed in the job description.
You can view your progress and application communications when you are logged into our recruitment system. Please check your spam/junk folders if you do not receive associated email updates.
