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Duplicate this page into your own Notion workspace so you can work in it. Use the "Duplicate" option from the page menu at the top right. Everything below is meant to be rated, written in and revisited, so you want your own copy rather than this one.

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This is a working self-assessment across the five capability groups service design keeps asking for: research, facilitation, systems thinking, communication and delivery. It is built to show you the shape of your own practice, not to produce a number you can quote.

Give it about forty minutes. Answer each prompt with evidence rather than instinct: when you last did this on a real project, what happened, and whether you would be confident doing it again next month without help.

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This is a diagnostic, not a scorecard. Nobody holds all five groups at the same level, and the people who appear to are usually working in a team that quietly covers their gaps. Rating yourself generously across the board teaches you nothing. Rating yourself harshly leaves you discouraged about a profession nobody performs evenly. Rate what you can evidence, then move on.

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How to use this

1. Read what good looks like for a group before you rate it. The description is the actual standard. The number is only shorthand.
2. Rate yourself 1 to 5 using the scale below.
3. Write the evidence: which project, roughly when, and what happened.
4. Answer the confidence question honestly. Could you carry this unaided next month?
5. Come back in six months, rate again in the final column, and compare. The movement matters more than the level.

The rating scale

1 to 2

You have read about it or watched someone else do it. You have not carried it yourself, or you did it once under close supervision.

3

You have done it on a real project with support. You would need help, a template or a second pair of hands to repeat it.

4 to 5

You have carried it alone on a real project. At 5 you did so within the last twelve months, and would take it on again next month without preparation.

Your ratings at a glance

Fill this in after working through the five groups below. Leave the last column blank for now.

🔎 1. Research and evidence

What good looks like

• you plan and run qualitative research that produces something you did not already expect
• you observe a service being delivered rather than relying on how people describe it