Parliament Careers — Rethinking the candidate journey

Overview

During my role at Parliament, I had the opportunity to redesign the existing careers pages. The work explored how a parliamentary careers experience could feel clearer, more engaging and more human while remaining consistent with an established digital estate.

I was the sole designer during the initial discovery and design phase. Across three sprints—approximately six weeks—I worked alongside the delivery team and collaborated with a separate team specialising in design systems to produce high-quality mock-ups and prototypes.

Prototype screens — replace this placeholder with the final careers-page designs

My role

As the sole designer for the initial phase, I was responsible for carrying the work from early discovery into a tangible design direction. My contribution included:

• Understanding the current careers-page experience and where it could be improved.
• Exploring different ways to organise and present careers content.
• Developing ideas through wireframes, mock-ups and prototypes.
• Working with design-system specialists to keep the designs consistent and achievable.
• Bringing the wider team into the design process through collaboration and feedback.

Project length: three sprints / six weeks
Role: sole designer during initial discovery
Collaboration: delivery team and design-system specialists

The opportunity

Careers pages have to do more than list vacancies. They introduce an organisation, help people understand whether they belong there and support them in taking a confident next step.

For Parliament, the additional challenge was to find room for warmth and personality within a setting associated with trust, clarity and institutional consistency. The redesign needed to feel recognisably parliamentary without being limited by the way careers content had traditionally been presented.

Placeholder: Add any evidence from the existing-site review, user feedback, analytics or stakeholder conversations that helped define the problem.

Discovery & direction

The initial discovery focused on understanding the existing experience, identifying content and navigation opportunities, and testing how far the visual language could be pushed while still feeling appropriate for Parliament.

The work benefited from close collaboration. Rather than treating the design system as a constraint applied at the end, we involved the specialist team while ideas were still forming. This helped us distinguish between patterns we could reuse, places where we could adapt an existing component and moments that called for a new approach.

Early concepts and iterations — replace with sketches, wireframes or design-system explorations

Working across three sprints

The six-week window encouraged a focused, iterative process:

1. Understand: review the current journey, gather context and agree which parts of the experience needed the most attention.
2. Explore: generate and compare different content, layout and interaction directions without becoming attached to the first idea.
3. Refine: develop the strongest route into detailed mock-ups and a prototype, using design-system guidance to improve consistency and feasibility.

This was not a rigid hand-off between phases. Ideas moved backwards and forwards as feedback surfaced new questions—the kind of collaboration that made the project especially enjoyable.

Design-system collaboration

Working alongside the design-system team gave the project a useful balance: enough structure to protect quality and consistency, with enough flexibility to think beyond familiar public-sector page patterns.

The collaboration supported higher-fidelity mock-ups and prototypes while keeping implementation considerations visible throughout the design process. It also created space for shared ideation rather than asking one team to approve another team’s finished work.

Placeholder: Add the specific components, patterns or design-system decisions that shaped the final direction.

Outcome & reflection

The initial phase concluded with a set of refined mock-ups and prototypes that gave the team a clearer direction for the careers experience.

What I valued most was the opportunity to collaborate across teams, try new forms of ideation and think outside the box for a parliamentary website. The project reinforced that institutional design can still feel imaginative—especially when exploration and system thinking happen together.

Placeholder: Add what happened next: usability findings, stakeholder feedback, implementation status, launch details or measurable outcomes.