Cabinet Office placement
There was nothing I didn’t love about my three-month placement with the Open Innovation Team in the Cabinet Office. From day one I’d feel I was pretty much a genuine member of the team. The work was varied and incredibly interesting throughout and I’ve learnt so much. The internship was truly a high-intensity workshop in Talking to Officials. I can recommend this placement to anyone who wants to learn how Government operates and communicate their research to policy makers more effectively. And there’s probably never been a more exciting time to join the Civil Service than in the final quarter of 2019 – I was privileged to experience the Brexit showdown and the runup to the general election right at the heart of Government. It was a truly exciting three months.
This gig is for doctoral researchers who can think on their feet and enjoy working to tight deadlines on some quite different projects simultaneously. Chris Webber, the Head of the Open Innovation Team, started OIT several years back with the stated aim to get Whitehall officials to collaborate better with academics and experts outside the civil service so that they can make much better use of academic resources out there. Much of the work of the OIT therefore revolves around researching big policy projects of the day, generate novel ideas for policy making, find evidence that speaks for or against some policy proposal and to interview world-leading academics to get their input. I was surprised how quickly some of the world’s top academics would respond to a Cabinet Office email! The OIT is now an established unit of policy advisors and researchers within Whitehall so the workload is increasing and widening in scope. If you enjoy being busy like I do, then you’ll like this placement. The job is fast-paced but never too hectic and you won’t be staying unreasonably late.
I was lucky enough to be working on three major projects, all of which are pretty high impact. I’m actually not allowed to talk much about them – how cool is that? – but I can say that they involved other teams in the Cabinet Office, other government departments and a London Council. This is great exposure as you’ll find yourself talking to a lot of people from various parts of the organisation and obviously you’ll meet a lot of academics too, many of whom are likely to be from outside your field of expertise. For each of the projects that I was working on there were different levels or stages of intensity depending on the appetite of the commissioning department. A quick scoping document may have a turnaround of only a couple of days while a larger piece of research that may culminate in a 50-page report can take several weeks to produce.
While I have solid experience of writing for academic purposes and producing op-ed pieces for newspapers and magazines, writing for ministers and senior civil servants is very different. Their time is limited and no one will care much about the intricacies of your referencing style. So a key skill that I’ve picked up over the course of the three months is to communicate a narrative in an efficient way, oftentimes using slide decks rather than an actual report. Ministers tend to think primarily in terms of costs and risks and framing your research and recommendations with this in mind is really important. The team will tell you right away if you’re being too wordy or unclear – being on message is key if you wish to get your views and insights across. This is a great skill to hone and of no harm to a doctoral researcher.
True to the expectations I’d had about this kind of work, agendas and priorities can change from one minute to the next so it can, and did, happen that you work hard on a project only to find it shelved the next morning. But the reverse is true also: an innocent piece of desk research may get picked up and suddenly you find yourself invited to present to the Directorate or even the Permanent Secretary!
You get to work in the Treasury Building in Whitehall, which is a treat, but there are trips to university campuses across the country too. I supported a member of the OIT on a trip to Lancaster University where we ran a one-day policy workshop. Students prepared a pitch and presentation on a set question, e.g. novel ways for the government to support a green economy, and then came down to Whitehall to present their ideas a couple of weeks later.
The three months went by really fast. I’d like to thank the entire OIT for considering and treating me like a colleague rather than an intern: I was invited to all team meetings, contributed to internal strategy reviews and would join them for the odd social too. I’d also like to thank the entire team at Public Policy|Southampton for this opportunity and in particular Yaryna, of course, who was super friendly and always happy to help with the complexities of the admin side of things. Anyone interested in pursuing this placement feel free to get in touch.
Juljan Krause is a doctoral researcher in Web Science and based at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton where he researches the global security implications of quantum computing and quantum communication networks. Juljan is also the Editor of the peer-reviewed philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics.