NHS digital and IT jobs: how to write your supporting information (with example)

Updated · By the Tick the Spec team

NHS digital and IT roles include service desk analysts, desktop and infrastructure engineers, application and clinical systems specialists, data analysts, developers, cyber security and project roles, typically from Band 3 to Band 8 depending on responsibility. The person specification usually asks for technical skills and qualifications (or equivalent experience), experience supporting users, problem-solving, information governance and security awareness, and communication with non-technical staff, often clinicians. Your supporting information should prove each with a specific example that shows the technical work and the effect on users and patients.

What digital person specifications often ask for

  • Qualifications: a relevant degree or equivalent experience; vendor or industry certifications (for example ITIL, Microsoft, CompTIA, cloud or security certifications) as essential or desirable depending on the role.
  • Experience: IT support, systems administration, application support, data analysis, development or project delivery, ideally in a large or complex organisation.
  • Knowledge: service management processes (incident, problem, change), information governance and data security, accessibility; for clinical systems roles, an understanding of how clinicians use electronic patient records.
  • Skills: troubleshooting, documentation, prioritising tickets against service levels, explaining technical issues in plain English, working with suppliers.
  • Qualities: calm under pressure, customer focus, willingness to work on call or out of hours where needed.

Step by step

  1. Match your technical skills to the criteria, but always with an example of use, not just a list.
  2. Show the user and the patient: in the NHS, a broken printer on a ward or a clinical system outage affects care. Show you understand the stakes and prioritise accordingly.
  3. Show process: logging, escalation, change control, root cause analysis.
  4. Show security and governance in practice: access controls, phishing reports, data handling.
  5. Show communication: training users, writing guides, explaining issues to managers.
  6. Give results: resolution times, fewer repeat incidents, adoption rates.

Worked example (fictional)

This is invented. The applicant, employer and figures are fictional.

Applicant: Ben, a second-line support analyst at a university, applying for a Band 5 IT Support Analyst post in an acute trust. Two criteria: "Experience of resolving incidents within agreed service levels" and "Ability to communicate technical information to non-technical users".

Experience of resolving incidents within agreed service levels. I handle around 25 incidents a day for 4,000 staff and 20,000 students, working to priority-based service levels in our ITSM tool. During exam week, a fault stopped lecture theatre PCs from logging in. I logged it as a priority one incident, identified from event logs that a group policy change had broken authentication, rolled it back through our emergency change process, and restored service within 40 minutes. I wrote the root cause note and proposed that policy changes are tested on one room first, which is now standard. I understand that on a hospital site, a similar outage on a ward would need even faster response and clear communication with the nurse in charge.

Communicating technical information to non-technical users. When we moved staff to multi-factor authentication, I wrote a one-page guide with screenshots and ran drop-in sessions for administrative teams. I avoided jargon and showed people the steps on their own phones. Login-related calls in the month after go-live were about half what we had forecast. I also helped an older member of staff with limited IT confidence set up an alternative authentication method so she was not left behind.

Data and analytics roles

For analyst roles, show the full cycle: understanding the question, sourcing and cleaning data, analysis (SQL, Excel, Power BI, R or Python as relevant), presenting findings to non-specialists, and what decision changed as a result. Show awareness of data protection and appropriate use of patient data.

Common mistakes

  • A long list of technologies with no examples.
  • Ignoring the clinical context: show you understand that IT supports patient care.
  • Too much jargon for a mixed panel.
  • Leaving out security and information governance.
  • Not mentioning on-call or rota requirements when the advert asks.

Tick the Spec's free shortlisting sheet maps your CV to each criterion in the job pack and shows which need a stronger example. If you are moving into the NHS from another sector, see our career changers guide.

Sources

All guides