Blog

A lagom leg up

Stephen Hale
Some of the Lagom team in a meeting

We’ve just published a list of all the things Lagom offers to people thinking about careers in digital or user research: Careers, internships and work experience.

As we say on the page, the team at Lagom are fortunate enough to earn a good living by doing meaningful and interesting work.

But we’ve all benefited from plenty of help to get where we are, and we want to make sure we give a little bit of help back.

Personally, I know I’ve had my fair share of help with my career over the years. 

The most transformative help I had was probably from a coach who went on to become a grief counsellor, and was brilliant at helping me deconstruct my approach to work.   

I’ve had some lousy mentoring experiences too. And awful work experience experiences (looking at you Nottingham Magistrates Court). So I know that it’s not easy to get this stuff right.

There are some limits to our offer. We don’t have unlimited capacity for this. And we’re all remote, so there’s no office to come to. But we’ve thought hard about the types of help we can provide, and who we think we can best help.

The things we’re offering include:

  • A chat over a cup of coffee
  • A talk or presentation in a school or further education college 
  • A mentor 
  • Student projects critique
  • Work experience as a digital user researcher 
  • Graduate digital user researcher internship
  • Non-graduate digital user researcher internship
  • Extended digital user researcher internship

This formalises the things we offer to people who might need a bit of a leg up. 

Most of the things we’re offering are things we have already provided informally, in one way or another.

In fact, Adam joined Lagom permanently after doing an internship with us. John has recently critiqued student projects for Birmingham University. Liam had a virtual career chat and coffee just the other day.

To be honest, I think we benefit from doing these things as much as the people we’re offering a leg up to.

If you’re interested in taking us up on any of this, take a look at the page and get in touch


Related Case Studies

A critique of the leaver survey approach for HIT Training

HIT Training Ltd (HIT) is the leading specialist training and apprenticeship provider for the UK’s hospitality, catering and retail…

Discovery for NHS England’s national postgraduate trainee recruitment system

NHS England is responsible for the national postgraduate trainee recruitment system (Oriel), which is used to recruit postgraduate trainees.  The…

More from the Author

Stephen Hale

Strategist

Stephen Hale 05/10/2023

Expertise versus experience: which one is the best?

Lagom is a team of proper experts.  50% of our…

Stephen Hale 21/04/2023

Can this be an exemplar discovery?

We are sometimes asked to do discovery work designed to…

Stephen Hale 28/06/2022

7 things I’ve learned about social care by doing research in social care

We do a lot of research about adult social care…