Switched on to the power of the internet

Why Jon Worth switched from the British civil service to website design.

Some might think it foolhardy to give up a secure and well-paid job to try to turn a hobby into a career, but, as a British civil servant in London, Jon Worth missed responsibility and disliked “the hierarchical structure” too much to linger.

Worth, who is now 29, had been the president of the Young European Federalists, a voluntary job “with a lot of responsibility”.

After a few years in the civil service, he concluded that “I would probably have had to wait for another five years before enjoying responsibility of that sort again”.

In 2007 he left the civil service to become a web designer. An early slice of luck came courtesy of a senior politician in the Labour Party, of which he was a paid-up member.

“Harriet Harman was campaigning to become the deputy leader of the Labour party at the time. I asked if I could help her in any way and started to design her campaign website on a voluntary basis,” he says. “It was very well received and political allies of hers lined up to ask if I could do similar things for them.”

He did, but chose not to stay in London, instead moving to Brussels in 2007. It was a natural destination. After leaving Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics, and after a short stint with a non-governmental organisation in Berlin, he had worked as an assistant to a Labour MEP, Neena Gill, and then gained a master’s degree at the College of Europe in 2004.

Policy advice

The EU was also a thread that had run through his three years in the civil service: he initially worked as a policy adviser on European energy markets for the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry and then as a lecturer on EU affairs at the National School of Government, where he still lectures three times a month.

In Brussels, Worth is perhaps known most for his blogging about the EU, a hobby that takes up a “considerable amount of time”, but many public-affairs websites in Brussels are also his work.

Since moving to Brussels, he has designed 60 websites – most of them of a political character – and is working on another 15 projects.

“I want them to focus on what messages they want to communicate and see the bigger picture rather than to look at specific colours of the website and so on,” he says. His best-known web design to date was for the ‘atheist bus’, part of a campaign that saw adverts promoting atheism placed in public transport in the UK and, later, elsewhere in Europe.

Another more recent assignment includes the design for a campaign to prevent the number of women in the European Commission from falling. “Within four days, we managed to attract more Facebook fans than Jerzy Buzek, the European Parliament’s president,” Worth says.

He believes more MEPs need to explore what the web can do for them.

“Many MEPs are not even close to using the internet as a good communication tool,” he says. “There are probably very few people who are interested in what MEPs do, but those who are interested are all over the place. It is mainly through the internet that they can be reached.”

Potential

Earlier this year, he and several partners began a web agency whose name – TechPolitics – underlines their belief in the potential of online communication for politicians. They also believe it fills a gap in the market. “I can’t really name a single tech agency devoted to the EU,” Worth says.

These are still early days and Worth acknowledges that “I am not really sure where to take the company at the moment”.

That is more than a comment about the market.

“I still want to be involved in doing the projects because that is what I like,” he says. “I would hate just to delegate work and manage. That would be like the civil service I left.”

Rikard Jozwiak is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.