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Service design is a bit of an oddity in 2024, it is both somewhat unknown to the general public but it is also swiftly becoming a core competence in Finnish Higher Education and in the job market. This means that it is being taught not just as a separate subject in itself, but it is being incorporated into many subjects as a necessary skillset. The recent project, Creative Flow and Competence for the Cultural Sector, was set up for creative professionals to access courses that updated and strengthened entrepreneurial skills. This training covered different aspects of networking international markets sales marketing branding innovation service design video editing 3D printing future skills digital tools Students didn’t have to take all of them, they could choose which of these courses (and credits) that they wanted to complete. There were a lot of opportunities to upskill for these creative professionals that possibly were not available when they studied or that have developed since they graduated.  Skills Gap - older workers don’t have it, job descriptions require Service design is something that has been around for a while now but it has only been included in academic courses for the past few years; and even this is not very evenly spread. This means that even if a participant only graduated 3-5 years ago, it is very possible that they never got any instruction in service design. As degree programmes progress and get updated, service design is being included more frequently across subjects. This development in service design education is leading to a skills gap in the workplace and in entrepreneurship. Younger people are entering the workforce with service design skills and understanding while their managers and co-workers may not have the same knowledge. Having service design be more widely known in workplaces is important because it is a co-creative method that can include many people from many different parts of the organisation. This is one reason that it is important to upskill as many people as possible. It is also important to upskill those who are taking on entrepreneurial challenges with the same skills so that they can benefit also. Tools and Methods learned My role in this project was to teach the participants about service design in two different courses of this project. Once in the course called The Brilliant Future of the Brand (translated from the Finnish name, Brändin loistava tulevaisuus) and the Creative Entrepreneurship course. Service design is a mindset, a process, and a set of tools that can be used in a lot of different scenarios for finding pain points, fixing problems, discovering your potential customers, and designing the services for those customers. This means that these are some great tools for starting or improving your own company. In the Branding course, service design was used to explore who their customers were and how to understand them. This understanding will help them to build their brand and will teach them how to communicate with their potential customers. Additionally, the service design skills will help them how to: interview people create an interview guide use the insights from those interviews to understand their customers create personas use the words heard during the interviews to market to the customer. In the Creative Entrepreneurship course, we used the same tools (interviews and personas) but this time it was about teaching them how to develop the customer journey to make a great customer experience through customer research. Good Skills for Entrepreneurs Knowing how to understand your customers is one of the most important skillsets that an entrepreneur can have. Having the tools and confidence to strategically interview potential customers, gather insights, and design customer journeys is a great advantage as an entrepreneur. It is also really important to have clarity on the problem that you are solving, which you will also learn about through your customer research.   Concrete Ways to Use These Skills The participants used the tools to both investigate the contexts, needs, and wants of current customers and to explore potential customers for businesses not fully created yet. This is how you use these skills both before your company is started and after you have already set it up. These skills are versatile and you don’t need to worry if you didn’t use them before you set up the company. Understanding your customers is an ongoing process as the market, expectations, and needs change over time. Customer research is not something that you only do once. This means that as you will periodically engage in customer research especially when you begin to see shifts and changes in their behaviour (increase of abandoned online shopping carts, decrease in web shop visits, increased complaints or returns, etc.). So, it does not really matter if you started your company without conducting this kind of research, there are many opportunities to do it once you have started. This research will allow you, like the participants to pinpoint their customers and their real customer needs and wants. Student Feedback The students who did not yet have a business, created an interview guide and other ways to collect feedback along the customer journey. They also included moments along the journey to implement observation into the process. Another student, who is involved in an organisation that already exists managed to connect with some external stakeholders and interview them to see how their visions of future developments could look. Additionally, they also were able to engage in some environmental scanning and observing to see how the market around them is shifting. The students reported that [translated from Finnish] “feedback still supports the planning and also enables marketing direction and content. It is also good to assess the pace and direction of developing your own operations.” The students have been shown the tools that will enable them to plan for the short and medium term with their customers. These skills will help them to build their business on a firm foundation. Free Access to Service Design Education If service design is something that you want to learn more about, then Metropolia has created an online open access course called Service Design Sprint (in English) and Palvelumuotoilun sprint (in Finnish). This course gives you a thorough overview of the tools that the participants learned and so much more. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. With a Bachelor’s from Canada, a Master’s degree from Sweden, an MBA in Service Innovation & Design from Laurea, and her AmO from Haaga-Helia, she is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. Don’t be surprised if she knocks on your door to talk about learning co-creation methods through intensive learning experiences.