I spent three years working in the Treasury, between May 2019 and May 2022. It is still the single most formative job of my career. I wrote about it, and why I left, in my blog earlier this year.

In this blog, I will give my take on the reasons to work there, and reasons not to, if you want to have a lot of impact in your career. My experience was focussed, so it is inevitably more useful to some people than others. All I can do is be open about the likely biases, which I’ve listed at the end*.

You can have a lot of impact at the Treasury

The Treasury may be small, but it casts a long shadow in British public policy. So long that multiple reviews have called for it to be broken up, for wielding undue levels of power and influence over wider UK policy with its role in controlling public finances. Some of this skepticism over-simplifies the issues, but I agree that it has an outsized role in the rest of the government.

And the Treasury is uncommon in that there’s more scope for individuals, particularly earlier in their career, to play a greater role in it- and that’s why many readers might consider working there. One of the most common virtues (or vices, depending on who you ask), is the Treasury’s flat structure - the trust it gives relatively junior staff to operate quite autonomously. 

The impact you can have is unevenly distributed

“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing” - attributed to Oscar Wilde

Treasury jobs tend to be high impact roles, in an organisation with a lot of leverage. As someone put it to me recently, “there’s no bigger sandbox you can play in than the Treasury''. But when deciding whether or not to work there, it’s more important to consider the kind of impact you can have at the Treasury, rather than some kind of aggregate level - that’s what will really matter if you take the job.

The Treasury’s influence is concentrated around money. It has lots of influence on issues which cost the taxpayer a lot, or have a big effect on the economy. It doesn’t have as much influence on issues which don’t. You can probably have a lot of influence in the latter areas if you are creative, but the day-to-day incentives in the department will keep you focussed on the things which cost a lot, and anything else will feel like you’re fighting against the tide.

Because it deals with the “big handfuls” of government policy, the Treasury is deeply affected by competing political priorities. Indeed, it often forces that competition. Spending Reviews and other fiscal events force the government to prioritise the very long list of things it would like to do into a short list of the things that it can afford to do. This forcing of trade-offs is core to the Treasury, but day-to-day it means your influence as an official is through negotiation. The policies in your area will be competing for budget, or tax relief, or legislative time with other teams in HMT and across government, and if you can’t accept that give-and-take then you’re likely to find it frustrating. 

Because of the scale of big financial and economic decisions, even in a flat and very empowered culture, it can feel like they are out of your hands. Something you’ve worked on for months might be coming to a head in a meeting between the Prime Minister and Chancellor, on a long list of other big-ticket issues. In practice, you can influence that kind of set-piece events, but often only at the margins, and it takes months of prep work to get there. 

Why the Treasury specifically?

Many of these lessons about what impact at the Treasury looks like (focused on finances, political trade offs, learning to influence policy at the margins) are true for success in other government jobs as well - in fact, if you aren’t considering those factors in other policy roles, you are probably doing them wrong. And they are definitely part of day-to-day life in other high-impact government jobs - working at No.10, jobs in Private Office, leading big transformation programmes, doing groundbreaking analysis, and working in parts of the Cabinet Office. 

So what is more uncommon about the Treasury?

The Treasury values judgement. Netflix published a slide deck outlining their company culture in 2009, which pointed out that “actual company values, as opposed to nice-sounding company values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go”. In the civil service, rewarding people and letting them go are pretty rarely used, and promotion is so heavily bureaucratised that it’s abstract from culture. The best proxy is what people say. Every culture I’ve worked in, you notice different words become the most vaunted compliment. At the Home Office, people said their excellent colleagues were really “on it”. At Faculty, an AI company, the compliment people paid others was that they were “smart”. At the Treasury, it’s that someone “has great judgement”. Because the Treasury embraces trade-offs within a limited pool of choices, it is reliant on junior colleagues arguing their case, even if it won’t always be right.

And exercising judgement requires courage. Peter Thiel wrote that “brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius”. Management spans are very wide at the Treasury - at peak size, my team was eight people, covering annual budgets of close to £20 billion. More junior officials in the Treasury have to exercise their judgement, publicly with senior officials and Ministers, much more than other departments usually do. If you make the wrong call, often you will find out very quickly, and that can be tough. But it encourages bravery, which is very important in a profession often criticised for being unwilling to ‘tell truth to power’.

“I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The Treasury is a small party. And its policy making is much more networked across the department than many other parts of Whitehall, which operate exclusively in organisation silo's. This creates a relatively open culture, and helps the flat hierarchy mentioned earlier be a success. But it also means there’s not much privacy about your area - if you’re going to succeed, you have to really live your ‘working together’ Behaviour examples, and build big coalitions across other teams. And if you fail, it will be visible to more people than it might be in other jobs. 

The support networks are very strong, particularly the group of other spending team leaders who I could compare notes with on shared issues. That’s partly a function of greater talent density than in some other parts of government - you have more peers who can give you genuinely useful advice, because they’re very capable and their jobs are analogous to yours. The Treasury performs consistently better on the annual People Survey than other departments, and experiences fewer of the performance management issues I wrote about recently for Civil Service World. 

The Treasury practices a specific craft. All organisations run the risk of group-think, and criticism of Treasury orthodoxy are sometimes justified. But one under-rated reason to work there is that most of the Treasury has more professional standards of what it practises than other departments, certainly in policy roles. The processes it runs for fiscal events, forecasting and negotiating are repeatable and well practised - you can learn from them over time, in a way you can’t if you do some other jobs. By the time I had left, there was a lot more thought put into codifying the Treasury’s practice. Extensive guidance always existed - in Spending Teams you were constantly advising based on principles in The Green Book, Managing Public Money, and the Consolidated Budgeting Guidance. But more training was also being delivered than I had in any other role.

Why not work in the Treasury?

There are plenty of people who want to have very impactful government careers, who are better-suited to other options. Here are some common characteristics to think about:

You don’t like finance, economics and statistics. This may sound silly, and it’s intuitive when I talk to people outside of government that you should only work at the Treasury if you’re very interested in working with numbers. But because civil servants wrap the Treasury up with No.10 and the Cabinet Office as part of the ‘centre’, people often assume that they Treasury officials need exactly the same skills as a good Private Secretary would have - political handling, quick judgement, the ability to write a good briefing. But unlike those other jobs, you need to be able to back that up with quantitative analysis in most (if not all) jobs at HMT. This is the most common failure mode for people who join.

You live and die with a specific policy. The venture capitalist John Doer encouraged startup founders to hire missionaries, nor mercenaries. People who believed in a product to a cult-like degree. This is good advice for startups, but it’s imperfect for civil servants. If you’re a zealous advocate for a particular policy, then you probably shouldn’t be working in Whitehall at all - that’s hardly the marker of an impartial civil servant. But the Treasury demands more detachment from individual policies than other parts of Whitehall, because of the standards of judgement and the difficulty of being the one to force a financial trade-off. 

You don’t have thick skin. Particularly when it comes to public spending, some of the trade-offs you’ll be involved in making aren’t pretty. We always want to spend more than we can afford, and the Treasury is the balancing function, which can seem very impersonal when you’re talking about funding for health services or vulnerable people. There are always immature civil servants in other parts of Whitehall, who don’t realise you’re just doing your job, and take it personally if you can’t fund their project. That’s their fault, but it is unavoidable. 

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If this doesn’t answer a question you had, then please get in touch and ask away! And I’d love to get feedback from other people who have worked at the Treasury, on whether this chimes with their experiences.

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*Notes on biases

• I joined ‘mid-career’, having already managed teams in the Home Office. I didn’t join through the Graduate Development Programme (the Treasury’s version of the Fast Stream), though I know several who did. 

• I worked in the ‘Spending’ part of the Treasury - the teams which get the most coverage outside of the Treasury, but are only a small part of the organisation. When I was there, roughly 250 people worked on public spending, in an organisation which now counts 3,175 staff, the majority in tax, financial services, fiscal or economic policy. 

• 2019 to 2022 was a period of massive fiscal expansion, based on the policies of Boris Johnson’s government and the Covid-19 crisis. The Treasury was spending a lot of money, and that was good business for Treasury officials. There were more jobs than there are now in an era of headcount reductions. Many more jobs are available in Darlington now than Horse Guards Road, but the Darlington teams were still relatively new when I worked there

Talk to any civil servant about job applications and mention the word “behaviours”, and you are likely to see them shiver as they start subconsciously recalling the process of drafting, refining, drafting, and refining. 

However, though arguably a dehumanising and less than optimal element of the civil service recruitment process - behaviours are not the big beast they are initially perceived to be. Fundamentally, behaviours are just the civil service’s way of categorising broad experiences you will have into buckets. Have you ever had to weigh up information and make a decision - that’s “making effective decisions”. Have you ever had to consider the wider implications of something you’ve done and make sure it doesn’t cause unnecessary conflict - that’s “seeing the big picture”. Have you ever had to communicate with a number of different individuals or groups, and tailor how you give a message to ensure it lands the best it can to achieve an outcome - that’s “communicating and influencing”. 

Once you understand what principle the behaviour is trying to assess, you can then start identifying your experiences that best fit with that and go through the rhythm of meeting the various ways in which each grade will look to assess it. 

Drafting concise and high scoring behaviours is an art, not a science. There is variance in the scorers' judgments. The exact same behaviour I had drafted once scored a 7 (out of 7) in one application, and also scored a 3 in another application which I submitted at the very same time. That’s why it’s often beneficial to apply to multiple roles to help refine your behaviours, as once you are on average scoring above a 5, you can have greater confidence that your behaviours are good enough to get you to any invite for that grade. 

How to write a behaviour?

Behaviours are personal small stories and as such advice on “how to write behaviours” often doesn’t get into sufficient detail of how to best tailor your experience into a good answer. This is why at IGC we provide mentoring and application support so that we can provide you with tailored advice.

Nevertheless, for those looking for a general overview, below are some helpful tips on how to maximise your chances. These apply to both written behaviours and those you use in the interview.

Top tips:

Using the Situation, Task, Actions, Results format is vital (and actually also really helpful). 

• Use the Situation and Task to concisely explain why the thing you worked on really mattered and what your specific role was. This should grab their attention.

• In the Action section, set out the main blocks of things you did to make progress. Zoom in on a particular block which is most relevant for the Behaviour you’re being asked. If it’s Making Effective Decisions, focus on the critical decision, what the trade-offs were, what you did to land on a robust decision etc. Invite people into your thought process.

• Use the Result element to not only share the positive outcomes as a result of your actions, but also the negative consequences that were avoided through the process. Be specific about indicators of success. If there are quantitative things include them e.g. £ amounts saved, include specific feedback you received.

• Don’t lose the narrative by packing it full of too much complex detail which the reading/interviewer won’t be able to easily follow.

• When preparing behaviour examples, make a grid of all the weighty things you’ve done in life (ideally in a professional context but if you’re just leaving university doesn’t have to be) and work out which behaviour could naturally fit with what you did. Most weighty things you’ve done are going to be good examples for multiple behaviours, but you’ll need to tailor what you say to the behaviour type.

At the interview:

• You can 100% re-use behaviours you used on your written application, there is a good chance the interviewers won’t have been the people who read your written answers. Even if they do, they should not mark you down for repeating it.

• You’ll know in advance the behaviour questions they’ll be asking so you’ll know what to prepare for. 

• The phrasing of the questions are normally very simple and broad. Sometimes, they may ask for a particular specific angle on the behaviour which your first choice prepared answer doesn’t naturally cover. If so, then if you have a similarly strong alternate answer which does cover it, then it may be worth switching. However, it is fine to use your default answer and try to make some small tweaks to show that you’re engaging somewhat with their specific question as the answer will primarily be marked on the criteria for the behaviour itself. 

• It’s better to say something competent sounding on the general behaviour than trying too hard to answer the specific question they’ve framed it under, as you’ll risk inventing a new behaviour on the fly to cover the specific angle and your grading will suffer.

• Typically aim to speak for 3 (or 4) minutes. Don’t dilute the story by waffling on and instead see follow-up questions as an opportunity to supplement not as a threat or as a signal your answer was bad. Being an interviewer myself, I’ve sometimes just asked follow up questions when I liked the answer and wanted to learn more about their work!

IGC has put together some behaviour drafting worksheets that can be used for those drafting behaviours at HEO/SEO and Grade7/6 levels. Feel free to download a copy of these to help when you start investing and drafting behaviours.

NB. External collaborators helped draft this blog.

When considering your route to impact, it can be difficult to know how to prioritise your current work, let alone know the best route to have impact over the next 5, 10, or 15+ years. However, there is sufficient evidence and reason to believe that the more experience and more influence you get, the higher your impact will be. This reality makes long-term career planning and strategy an investment that could pay dividends!

In the civil service, where the lines between expertise versus experience are often highly blurred, there is frequent discussion between optimising for a senior role versus optimising for a role in an impactful area. 

Unlike many other career paths - such as in medicine - where you undertake years of training in increasingly narrow specialisms in order to rise the ranks; the civil service frequently rewards general experience when it comes to promotions. It’s not unusual to speak to civil servants and hear that their deputy director or director has no previous experience in the policy area they are in charge of, but rather, has held an extensive number of cross-government roles. In comparison, the highest impact roles are less common and therefore opportunities are not only often harder to secure but result in fewer avenues to progress quickly to a senior position.

This post is not to comment on the efficacy of the civil service system, but rather to provide an overview of the benefits and potential strategies you can employ if you wish to focus on trying to secure a very senior role versus a role in a high impact area. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and there is good reason to believe both paths could ultimately lead to the same desired conclusion (a very senior role in a very high impact area). Nevertheless, they each come with different trade-offs, risks, and benefits, as discussed below.

Optimise for a very senior role

Most Director Generals or Permanent Secretaries are going to have parts of their portfolio which are particularly impactful. They can then focus on making sure those areas go as well as possible (hiring good people into them etc.). So if you fully optimise for seniority and rapidly getting promotions you will probably have to broaden the opportunities you are open to, potentially those with less impact potential, but if you are successful then you can focus your attention on the impactful parts of your portfolio. Whilst the next best person who would take the role may be similarly competent to you, the hope is that you’d be more intentional about spotting particularly impactful opportunities in your portfolio.

Early career strategy if optimising for seniority

If you desire to ultimately get to a senior position you’ll need to maximise your competitive advantage but also understand it may be a long game. Below are some ways to achieve this:

• You can seek roles which get you exposed to the most high profile parts of government. To keep up to date on these, set up keyword/departmental job alerts on Civil Service Jobs for them. Areas of government likely to have a high density of such roles include:

  • Number 10

  • The collective agreement functions of Cabinet Office (e.g. Economic & Domestic Affairs Secretariat, National Security Secretariat)

  • Ministerial private offices

  • HMT roles in spending teams, or the economics, tax, and fiscal directorates

• Seek roles which are high profile and are going to get you opportunities to do exciting new things which will be easy for you to talk about in future job applications. Examples could be:

• Negotiating high profile international agreements

• Secretariat for a high profile enquiry or task force

• Areas which are undergoing a well publicised crisis

• Once you get a high profile role, it’s likely to be easier to get promoted or get another such role role - which compounds the potential benefits. You’ll then need to work out what the optimal length of time to stay is before moving on/seeking a promotion.

Optimise for a role in an impactful area

Some teams within the civil service have the potential for orders of magnitude with more impact than others. We’ve all likely seen the analysis that the top 10% charities are 10 to 100 times more effective than the other 90% - it’s reasonable to assume there is a similar differential when it comes to problem areas and potential impact in the civil service. 

Often the most impactful areas aren’t the most high profile or sought after, so by building your career strategy around trying to join those then you can have a reasonable chance of securing them. However, targeting an impactful area is much easier the more junior the grade you’re willing to work at, as there are many more HEO roles working on an area than there are Deputy Directors. Once you get into an impactful policy area your opportunities for promotion will be much slower if you want to stay in it given there are fewer roles that are senior to you that allow you to stay in the same area.

Early career strategy if optimising for a role in an impactful area

If you desire to work in a high impact potential area then you’ll need to investigate where you could have the most impact and target your efforts to secure such roles. Below are some ways to achieve this:

• Work out what cause areas you think are particularly impactful. See Impactful Government Career’s list of potentially high impact hub areas here.

• If your cause areas line up with IGC’s, you can speak to the hub leader directly who can let you know the hiring landscape and which roles/departments are likely to be the most impactful. Even if they don’t line-up, IGC may still know of people working in the area so worth reaching out.

• If they don’t you could try and do some research on LinkedIn to see if you can get a conversation with those working in the area (people are normally up for talking to people interested in their job). 

• Set up Civil Service Job alerts for areas you would be interested in working in and apply for them when they come up. You can utilise the IGC jobs board to find current opportunities that may be of interest (noting this doesn’t include roles that are only open to existing civil servants).

• Even if you can’t immediately get a role working in your preferred cause area you could seek to take a role in an adjacent team/in the wider department. Lots of job hiring isn’t done on Civil Service Jobs and instead is done via less formal Expressions of Interest typically circulated within a department or part of a department.

• If you’re in the same department as the area you want to work in, be really intentional at reaching out to the hiring managers in that area to let them know of your interest. They may even be able to ‘level transfer’ you in without advertising the role at all.

• Once you get a role in an impactful cause area, then it’s about trying to prioritise ruthlessly, get in on the most important projects, build relationships and have a counterfactual impact.

Conclusion

Often, seeking to have impact by optimising for a very senior role is quite a high variance strategy. There aren’t many senior roles, and even fewer that have direct influence over high impact potential issues. Competition for such roles can also be incredibly high, but if you can succeed in getting one then your opportunity for impact may be considerably higher than if you remained in a narrow area from the beginning. 

On the other hand, whilst optimising for a role in a high impact policy area may limit your path to more senior positions,  it does provide the opportunity to have significant impact from much earlier in your career and is less risky than the climb high strategy. If you’re competent and build deep expertise in the area you may end up having significant influence in supporting Ministers to make impactful decisions in your chosen high impact specialism. 

Ultimately, the choice of strategy is an individual one and IGC’s suite of career coaches are available to discuss this and other uncertainties you may have, so that you can plan your career strategy effectively and maximise your chances of having an impactful career. 

NB. External collaborators helped draft this blog.

The technical talent gap in UK policy

Most of the policymakers working on AI regulation are not subject-matter experts, and many are new to tech policy. This is not meant as a criticism, but as a fact. Civil servants are generalists and as such are hired for general competency, and not because they’re subject matter experts. However, AI is quite a deeply technical subject in many regards, and therefore subject-specific input could greatly help the quality and outcomes of policy decisions.

Subject-specific input to government policy typically happens by:

• Policymakers having access and engaging with to advisers, which could look like external field experts, researchers, and lobby groups.

• Experts being ‘seconded’ into a team within a department for a specified time period.

However, with the recent creation of the AI Safety institute and scaling up of AI policy in departments including the 'Department for Science, Innovation & Technology', 'Cabinet Office', and various others - there is a fantastic opportunity for field experts to join the civil service directly.

There are good reasons why the UK Civil Service may be a very strong option for people with AI safety knowledge

1. The UK is rapidly moving on policy.

   1. There seems to be a real understanding and embracing of the full pace of AI development, and there are many bastions of hardworking, vocational policymakers in the UK civil service.

2. You are likely to have responsibility for important and interesting work, even at an early stage. 

   1. Many areas of the civil service provide great opportunities for having considerable influence and responsibility. Speak to any civil servant, and especially those that have experience in DSIT's recent AI teams, and you'll hear tales of regularly being asked to draft important documents about how the AI should regulate policy to key decision makers. This means your work could very quickly be landing on the desk of the Secretary of State, other Cabinet Ministers, or inside the No.10 itself.

3. The UK will have a Brussels effect on US policy.

   1. There is no escaping that the US matters a lot, especially on issues related to tech. However, there is a good argument that a window of time exists where the UK is ahead on AI policy, and there could be a mechanism for a Brussels effect via things like the potential collaboration between the UK AIS Institute and the US one.

Some reasons it’s not a strong option for everyone

1. There will be some bureaucracy. 

   1. Large organisations are often bureaucratic, but developing excellent AI policy involves multiple bureaucracy. There’s no magic future where any nation does away with bureaucracy in political institutions (having input from multiple stakeholders is after all part of the democratic process!).

2. There will be a lot of working with people. 

   1. There's often lots of need to engage stakeholders and have meetings to discuss policy options and different problems.

3. You may feel uncertain about the impact of your actions. 

   1. Unfortunately, the policymaking process is opaque, even to the people involved in it. There’s no magic answer to “the most impactful role to have in AI governance”. Joining the civil service is one way to become a part of the conversation and the journey.

Application advice

The way to make a successful application to the civil service is to ensure you demonstrate the behaviours it assesses for with your past experiences during the application and interview.

IGC provides bespoke support to help you through the application process, with feedback on your behaviours and interview techniques. Reach out to us now to request for mentoring support.

NB. External collaborators helped draft this blog.

This post will go over two cheap tests, each possible to do over a weekend, that you can do to test your fit for policy work. I am by no means the best person to be giving this advice but I received feedback that my advice was helpful, and I'm not going to let go of an opportunity to act old and wise. A lot of it is based off what worked for me, when I wanted to break into the field a few years ago.

A map of typical policy roles

'Policy' is a wide field with room for many skillsets. The skillsets needed for these roles vary significantly. It's worth exploring the different types of roles to find your fit. I like to visualize the different roles as lying on a spectrum, with abstract academic research in one end and lobbyism at the other:

The type of work will vary significantly at each end of this spectrum. Common for them all is a genuine interest in the policy-making process.

Test your fit in a week

Commonly recommended paths are various fellowships and internships. They are a great way to test ones fit, but they are also a large commitment.

For the complete beginner, we can do much cheaper!

Test 1: Read policy texts and write up your thoughts

Most fields of policy will have a few legislative texts or government white papers that are central to all work currently being done on the topic.

A few examples of relevant texts for a few cause areas and contexts:

• EU AI Policy: AI Act

• US Development cooperation: USAID's 2023 policy framework

• UK Planning Policy: Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill: reforms to national planning policy

Let's go with the example of EU AI Policy. The AI Act is available online in every European language. While the full document is >100 pages, the meat of the act is only about 20-30 pages or so (going off memory).

Read the document and try forming your own opinion of the act! What are its strengths and weaknesses? What would you change to improve it?

For now, don't worry too much about the quality of the output. A well informed inside view takes more than a weekend to develop!

Instead reflect over which parts of the exercise you found yourself the most engaged. If you found the exercise generally enjoyable once you got started, that's a sign you might be a good fit for policy work!

Additionally, digging into the source material is necessary to forming original views and will make you stand out to future employers. The object level of policy is underrated! My hope is that the exercise will leave you with a bunch of open questions you would like to further explore. How exactly did EU's delegated acts work again? What was the Parliament's response to the Commission's leaked working document?

If you keep pursuing the questions you're interested in, you'll soon find yourself nearing the frontier of knowledge for your area of policy interest. Once you find yourself with a question you can't find a good answer to, you might have stumbled onto a good project to further explore your fit.

Test 2: Follow a committee hearing

Parliaments typically have topic-based committees where members of the parliament debate current issues and legislation relevant to the committee. These debates are often publicly available on the parliament's website.

Try listening to a debate on the topic of your interest. What are the contentions? What arguments are used by each side? If you were to give the next speech, how would you argue for your own views?

If you find listening to the debate and crafting arguments engaging, that's a sign that you might be a good fit for especially the left side of the spectrum!

Neither this map nor the tests are comprehensive!

These exercises by no means make up a comprehensive test. The spectrum is meant to be an intuition-pump, nothing more! The goal of this post is to help get you started and get a chance to experience what some of the day-to-day work is like for different policy roles.

If you do either of these exercises, don't hesitate to ask for feedback from someone working in the field. You can always share it with me or speak to Impactful Government Careers, if you don't know who else to ask or showing your work to someone you wish to impress is too daunting.

I thought the best way to introduce myself as the newly appointed Director of Impactful Government Careers was to write this blog - hopefully providing an informative explanation of who I am, my path to this role, and my immediate focus as the new Director of IGC.

On the 20th September I turned 30 and as a natural consequence I’ve been reflecting on my life so far - the achievements I’ve had, and the places I’ve failed. I was married at 21, have lived in South London for 5 years and grew up in the South East of England, and as of last year became a father to a lovely, quite cheeky, and very energetic baby boy. More recently, I remembered receiving advice that: “your 20’s are for learning, 30’s are for building, and 40’s are for reaping the rewards”. Though somewhat inspiring, I keep feeling that underplays the enjoyment of the journey and neglects the reality that we are constantly learning, building, and reaping the rewards through-out our lives.

You are more than you were yesterday, and less than you will be tomorrow.

Who was I yesterday?

In 2012, I had a place to study Philosophy and Religious Studies at University. However, whilst working during my gap year I was made frequently cognizant of the after-effects of the financial crisis and concluded that I should do a degree that provided a clear profession that I could walk into afterwards. This led me to switch to studying a BSc Building Surveying and I ended up working in a local authority building regulations department for 3 years. Looking back, this was one of the greatest career errors I have ever made. This was not because I disliked the degree (I actually really enjoyed it), or because it hasn’t helped me get to where I am today (I attribute a lot to where I am today to that experience and the people I worked with and learnt from, including the best manager I’ve ever had). It was an error because my choice was based on perceived pressures and concerns, and I was not holistically looking at who I was or what I wanted to do with my life.

As I became increasingly unhappy with my direction I looked for alternative paths. I had always been interested in international development and as I investigated the roles available I consistently felt the desire to be in the room where the policies were being discussed. My education didn’t provide a clean doorway to that room, but the HM Treasury (HMT) graduate scheme did provide a window. Having passed their assessment centre and offered a role as a Policy Advisor, I confidently put down “International Development” as my preferred policy area to work in and I was (through a stroke of luck) given a project role in the ‘Official Development Assistance (ODA) Strategy and Spending’ team.

I often consider the c.18 months, between April 2018 and September 2019, I spent in this role among the highest impact moments of my career. During this time I focused my work on how to build a sustainable UK ODA system so that in future the UK could meet its 0.7% ODA:GNI target without the constant increases and decreases to the budget that undermined good long-term programming. My work resulted in Ministerial advice and a decision by the Chancellor to provide £420m additional funding announced 2018(i) and £430m in 2019(ii) - a significant proportion of which was spent on supporting multilateral humanitarian aid programmes that were heavily funding constrained at the time. This action not only ensured the UK would meet its 0.7% target, but it sought to address historic issues that led to perverse incentives and large risks to the value for money.

We started seeing the green shoots of this decision in early 2020, just after I was promoted out of the graduate development programme to help lead the ODA team through the 2020 Spending Review. Unfortunately, any professional gambler would’ve told me to quit while I was ahead. As Covid-19 struck the UK economy and as a consequence Ministers chose to reduce the UK’s ODA spend to 0.5% of GNI. There would need to be a whole separate blog post on that time, but my one reflection is that these types of moments highlight the important distinction between the decisions that Ministers make and the fundamental role of the Civil Service to advise them on the best methods to deliver their aims. There were many negative impacts and harms that resulted from the decisions to reduce spending - there was no avoiding that. But in such times there is opportunity to have counterfactual impact by advising on the most effective policies and programmes to protect and prioritise.

2020 was arguably the most personally and professionally challenging year and I needed a change. So in 2021 I went on loan to be the Head of Strategy at the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation. I joined the organisation as it faced a transition away from a quasi-think tank to an organisation focused on supporting responsible public-sector implementation of data and AI innovation. I experienced how a relatively small team could move nimbly in a large institutional system and shift itself into previously neglected or undiscovered areas. I also realised how individual interests and incentives can direct activities, and the challenges that exist when there are limited levers (such as financial or political) to deliver tangible results.

Following this I returned to HMT to help with the economic, humanitarian, and reconstruction support the UK was providing to Ukraine, before taking over maternity cover as Head of Development Policy. In this role my team and I were focused on driving value for money in FCDO’s international development programming and working with them to set the UK’s policies which related to the multilateral development banks and development finance more broadly.

My experiences have really emphasised the importance, influence, and impact that civil servants’ judgements have on some of the most important issues facing the country and world. This realisation led me to studying an MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences at UCL for the last couple of years - a course which focused on how individuals and groups form their judgements. My personal interest steered my research onto ways to improve reasoning in complex decision making under uncertainty, with a particular emphasis on how to improve predictions in policy and strategy - both causal (e.g. ‘how likely will x policy achieve y outcome’) and forecasting (e.g. ‘how likely is x event to occur’).

My immediate plan for IGC

It was the collection of my experiences above that led me to apply for the role of Director of Impactful Government Careers (IGC). I believe this role will utilise the skills I have obtained, challenge me in new ways, and enable me to help build something in an area that I believe has the potential to deliver enormous impact. As we know, policy is not predetermined to be good or impactful. It requires concerted effort from individuals interested in and incentivised to investigate, challenge assumptions, and provide well-reasoned advice. I am excited about the opportunity to lead IGC as we work with you and others who believe in the power of the civil service to do good, and to help you find, secure, and excel in your careers.

As I look forward to the next few weeks and months, my first priority is to continue the great work that Toby has already done and ensure that IGC is able to help you find impactful roles in the civil service, continuing the coaching service to help you build your skills, and to grow the community so that you can meet, network, and learn from other inspiring and motivated individuals. If you are looking for support or want to help in delivering any of these then please do email me at contact@impactfulgovcareers.org.

Additionally, I also see this as a great opportunity to reflect on how IGC can itself deliver the highest impact and where it should be focusing its efforts over the next 12-18 months to realise this. I will therefore be working to develop a public strategy for IGC, with the purpose of clearly outlining the organisation’s priorities and the activities it will (and won’t) be undertaking to achieve these. I believe this document, but more importantly the process to develop it, will ensure IGC is providing a unique offer, meeting the needs of the community, and is delivering impact.

I am acutely aware of the knowledge and experience that already exists within the community, and I am keen to listen and learn from you all as I lead IGC into this next stage. I therefore really welcome any and all feedback, views, and thoughts you may have on the future direction of IGC. I will be circulating a survey soon and I’d be grateful for any time you can spare to complete that. Equally, I’m always happy to take a call to have a more specific/in depth chat, or to discuss opportunities for getting involved in IGC’s work.

Thank you for reading this introductory post. I’m really excited to take IGC forward and you’ll hopefully be hearing more from myself and IGC over the coming months.

James Newport

(i) 2018 UK Budget ODA Statement (page 77)

(ii) 2019-20 Supplementary Estimates ODA Increase (page 128)

Civil servants do many things. Maybe you spend your day talking to experts, colleagues, and other stakeholders, drafting emails, papers and submissions, or doing research about your area. Your work will likely involve progressing towards multiple different goals. However, some of these things will have a much greater effect on the world than others. If you want your career to be impactful, work out which parts of your work are the most important, and prioritise those.

For example, I spoke to Richard, who worked for the US federal agency that regulates food additives. He once produced a cost-benefit analysis of a possible ban of trans-fats. He noticed that this one piece of legislation was vastly more important than any of his other work: his analysis suggested that thousands of people were dying each year due to trans-fats’ negative health effects. Responding to this, he prioritised his work on the trans-fats ban over his other work tasks. He made sure that any time he had to do anything on that project, it was on the top of his to-do list. He also worked to build a better picture of the wider legislative process so that he could do some of the work before he was asked for it. He believes that his work sped up the process significantly, and that even if he had only caused the legislation to become active a week earlier than it otherwise would have, he’d have saved 50 lives (see his story here).

Analyse your job

How can you work out which aspects of your job are disproportionately impactful? You need to develop a really clear understanding of what you are doing and why. How is work prioritised in your area? Who decides what does and doesn’t get done? If you want to prioritise better, the first step is to understand the current process. You can then think about how that prioritisation process can be improved.

A framework for prioritisation might look like this:

1. Write a list of all the different tasks you do

2. For each task, ask yourself: what is the goal of this task? What do I hope to achieve by doing this?

3. Rate the tasks’ goals (perhaps on a scale of 1 to 10, or any scale that makes sense to you)

4. Estimate how much progress each task helps you make towards the goal.

Having a weekly review where you stop and reflect on what you’ve achieved, and feedback from managers can also help with this.

Informal schemas like this can be useful, but it’s often difficult to know how important your goals are, or how much certain tasks help you achieve them - these questions can seem subjective and highly uncertain. You can add some rigour and objectivity to this process by using various quantitative tools such as those below.

Cost-benefit analyses

If you’re an economist, or have access to the time and resources of economists, the Green Book offers lots of technical methods to quantify costs and benefits. However, you don’t need a degree in economics to do cost-benefit analysis, and these tools can be applied to many areas, not just formal economic models and business cases. Governments often don't sufficiently quantify the costs and benefits, or the risks, of various projects or policy options. For example, in many government risk registers, the risks are only rated as red, amber, or green (RAG). Quantifying the severity and probability of these risks more explicitly would allow your team to better prioritise which risks should be focussed on. We think that anyone can get to grips with these tools, but if you are not an analyst, ask how you can best make use of the analytical professions to add rigour to your analysis.

Scale, solvability, and counterfactuals (The ITN framework)

This framework helps you estimate the relative value of working on a particular policy or project. You do this by analysing the scale, solvability and counterfactual of the work.

Scale (sometimes called ‘importance’) - how many individuals are affected and by how much? (eg: people who may be impacted, savings which could be made).

Solvability (sometimes called ‘tractability’) - how easy is success? What is the probability of failure? What are the barriers? How long will it take and how equipped are you to do something about it?

Counterfactual (or the related idea of ‘neglectedness’) - what happens if you don’t do this? Who else is working in this space? How neglected is this issue?

You can combine estimates of these to calculate how much impact each option that you are considering is expected to create.

Fermi estimates

A Fermi estimate is a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate. Ideally, when you are estimating costs, benefits and risks, you’ll be able to find good data sources that will allow you to produce statistics you can be confident in. In practice though, this standard of evidence often isn’t possible. Data might not exist, or it might be too low quality, or you might not have the time or resources to analyse it. Sometimes you need to come up with an estimate quickly based on very little hard data.

Fermi estimates provide a framework for estimating any figure, often adding much more value than you might intuitively expect. For example, we talked to a senior analyst in the Department for Transport who had to decide which of two projects their team should work on. It was not obvious which one was more important, and the two policy teams asking for analytical help seemed equally in need of support. Their team was unsure which of their project options was more impactful, and they had very little data to work with initially. So they decided to apply the ITN framework and use Fermi estimates to prioritise between them. They listed all the factors that might affect each project's impact. These included the total amount of money that could be saved, alongside the probability of success and what would be likely to happen if they didn't do the project. Using a combination of intuition and statistics, they produced an estimate of each of these factors. These estimates were then combined to produce a final estimate of each project’s value.

This work showed that one of the projects could deliver 100 times more value to the government.

No-one asked this civil servant to do this. They could have worked on the project that was easier, more interesting, or more prestigious. But by doing the thinking and making it quantitative, they were able to identify and work on the vastly more impactful project.

If you want to have a go at Fermi estimation, we recommend this website.

Weighted factor models

Let’s say you have a list of complicated options that you can’t decide between. Consider using a weighted factor model (also known as a decision matrix).

To build a weighted factor model, you need to list all your options and all the important factors related to your decision. Each factor is then weighted by importance and each option is scored against each important factor. By doing this in a spreadsheet, you can quickly calculate which option comes out on top. You’ll also be able to identify key uncertainties and decide whether you need to investigate them more before making a final decision.

An example of this that we talk about a lot is comparing different career options. See the instruction in our career decision tool to see a worked example of using weighted factor models.

See this article for several more examples of this.

Say no to less important work

Even if you know which parts of your work are the most important, this won’t help you unless you have the time and space to prioritise them. This means that it’s important to develop the habit of saying no to the less important things. Many of the ambitious, impact-focussed people we talk to say that they find it difficult to say no to work, and that their time is swallowed by emails and meetings that don’t seem to be contributing to their objectives.

Relatedly, because most central government jobs are complex, it's difficult for many managers to ensure that any given person or team's workload is appropriate. Sometimes the only signal that a person has too much work is that they appear to be struggling. And some jobs may make setting these boundaries difficult. Some managers might not trust you to use your time well, or might push you to deliver too much. Consider leaving a team that pushes you too hard. It is not okay and will also severely limit your ability to have an impact.

Final thought

The ability to develop a clear sense of what is being prioritised and why is a crucial tool for having an impact in government (and beyond). You can do this reflection and analysis in your job and in your wider team. Most good prioritisation involves both qualitative and quantitative work to compare options. Thinking quantitatively is particularly important to include because some options can be 10s or 100s of times better than others.

If you would like to talk about how you can think about prioritisation in your role then sign up for free career coaching with us here.

This post is an expansion on some of the specific points in part 3 of our career guide which you can read here.

When I was a newly-minted leader of a team of Civil Service analysts, I found myself at sea and with one big question: how can I become a really great manager? To figure this out, I founded a long-running study group, did management training, and tried plenty of popular (and not-so-popular) practices. And dare I say, it worked! Not a full transformation, but dammit if my team wasn’t getting things done!

In this post I share my top takeaways from the book I found most useful by far: The Handbook of the Principles of Organisational Behaviour. It’s directly applicable, evidence-based and so damn comprehensive: a true contender for the daddy of all management books. The subtitle says it all: ‘Indispensable knowledge for evidence-based management’. It’s been three years since I read it and tried to apply the most sensible bits in my work as a manager of analysts in the Civil Service. I also talk about the most important things I’ve learnt about management through my own experience as a manager. The below leaves a huge amount out, but, with that caveat, enjoy!

Paragraphs in blue italics are my additional views rather than the book’s.

Recruitment

Intelligence predicts job performance more than any other characteristic. This is followed by conscientiousness and emotional stability.

Hiring with intelligence tests isn’t always possible, and it does leave out domain knowledge. It’s often better to use proxies for these such as a range of work tasks and tests. How someone answers competency-based questions can tell you something about their emotional stability: what do their answers tell you about how they perceive the people they work with?

Candidates with more experience tend to perform better only within the first five years: after this, the number of years on the job stops predicting performance. So some experience is good, but loads of experience might not improve performance any more. This is true on average, so it won’t be true for everyone!

If you can’t offer someone a high salary, you can pay people in meaning: many people want to do useful things and you can provide them with an opportunity to fulfil this need. You can emphasise meaning in job adverts by making their contribution and impact clear (and making it sound fun!)

Retention

Many senior managers like to say ‘people quit because the Civil Service doesn’t pay enough’: in my experience, this is often untrue. The book claims that one thing consistently makes jobs more satisfying. Can you guess what it is? …..

…

…

(guess!....)

….

(… drumroll…….)

…..

Making the job mentally challenging! People tend to have greater job satisfaction when they are more challenged and engaged with the work itself: this predicts job satisfaction more than pay, relationship with co-workers or supervisor, or anything else.

In part 3 of the book, one of the authors, Timothy Judge argues that 5 facets make work challenging and fulfilling. Can you give your team most or all of these?:

1. The ability to see your work progress from start to end – even just understanding the bits you don't do yourself

2. Task significance: understanding how what you’re doing contributes to the organisation’s larger goals

3. Work that requires a variety of skills

4. Autonomy

5. Plenty of feedback

You can boil this down to three needs that many people have: mastery, autonomy and purpose. ‘Mastery’ here means ‘high (or increasing) competence at the work’. What can you do to push these buttons for your team?

Setting goals

People will commit to a high-bar goal if they believe they can reach it. It can help to reinforce someone’s belief in their own ability or ability to grow. You can do this by highlighting their past successes, the skills they’ve already gained and the goals they’ve achieved.

It’s more motivating if the meaning of the tasks is salient. This is related to employees’ need for purpose. This can include all kinds of reminders, particularly giving the employee some contact with beneficiaries of their work. If actual contact is not possible, you can remind employees how people will benefit from their efforts.

Unlike with money, the returns diminish very mildly for social reinforcement or recognition. So, within certain limits, you can't reinforce too often!

Goal interdependency is the sense that your success depends on the success of others. This can be very motivating. In my experience, the narrative of we’re all growing and learning together can be helpful.

Feedback

When giving positive feedback, it is much better to recognise specific things the employee did well, rather than a general "good job".

Errors can be framed as opportunities to reflect and learn.

Social reinforcement from the manager has the largest effect, though reinforcement from others is also impactful.

When you ask for feedback people may withhold useful information about things you could do better, for fear of upsetting you. I find it helpful to explicitly say that they will be doing me a favour by providing critical feedback, as it’s often the bit that helps me improve the most! If you act on constructive feedback and make it clear that it was because of their input, this will encourage your colleagues to do it more!

Developing the team

Look to the future: if you think longer term, you’ll have more scope to be ambitious without rushing. This may require you to commit to staying in one post for a while. This means there is a trade-off between getting more varied experience and having impact in the next five or so years.

If you do think long term you’re already ahead of the game. From one survey, only 13% of employers "understood clearly" what capabilities they'd need in 3-5 years time.

After-action reviews can be helpful, since they create positive feedback loops. It can be helpful if someone outside the team facilitates these reviews.

A useful concept is partitioned information responsibility. This means that rather than everyone needing to know everything, you ensure that at least one person in the team knows each piece of important information, and that everyone knows that they’re the person to talk to about that thing. Even after accounting for resilience to annual leave and turnover, applying this concept deliberately to a team can increase a team’s collective knowledge and expertise quite a bit.

If a team needs to learn something, set at least one person on the team the explicit objective to learn that thing.

Leadership and Vision

Know why you’re doing what you’re doing and communicate this to your team. You probably have some idea if you’re reading this! This positive vision is motivating and sustainable in the long term. It also saves you from resorting to harmful tactics that managers sometimes use to bring people together, for example, fostering an ‘us vs them’ mindset.

And finally, in a classic case of saving the best till last…

A leader’s most important job is to decide what work the team is going to do! Prioritise the most important things. Actively search for and create projects that are going to deliver huge value. See this section of the IGC career guide for some great ideas about prioritisation. Far too many brilliant people with brilliant processes are working on things which ultimately aren’t that big of a deal.

We hope you found this summary from Adam helpful! If you would like to discuss how to apply these ideas in your own team - sign up to have a call with us here.

Image generated by DALL-E 2.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the fastest growing deep technology in the world, with huge potential to rewrite the rules of entire industries, drive substantial economic growth and transform all areas of life.

The government takes the long term risk of non-aligned Artificial General Intelligence, and the unforeseeable changes that it would mean for the UK and the world, seriously.

- The UK’s National AI Strategy - September 2021

Introduction and summary

This guide is a short summary of promising places to work in the UK government to positively impact the development and use of AI in our society. We outline some of the key teams and why they might be impactful places to work. This is the first of a series of posts outlining where you can work on specific policy areas (see here for a list of the policy areas we intend to cover).

• Artificial Intelligence policy is already an impactful place to work and will continue to grow in importance over the coming years. This is in large part due to the huge potential benefits and thus-far unaddressed risks of very advanced systems.

• More advanced systems could revolutionise entire industries, deeply affect our day to day lives, significantly change the balance of power globally. These systems could even pose an existential threat to human civilisation.

• The UK government has recently published the National AI Strategy and AI Action Plan. This demonstrates a clear intention to take the extreme risks of advanced AI systems seriously and to make sure the UK is a world leader in AI development and governance.

• The key teams working in this area are The Office for AI, The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and the new Office for Science and Technology Strategy. However, it seems plausible that the most influential teams are elsewhere in government, particularly Treasury, Number 10 and Cabinet Office teams that deal with resilience (particularly the Civil Contingencies and National Security secretariats). See our more general guide to finding high impact teams here.

• If you agree that AI policy is high priority and think it may be a good fit for you, get in touch with us for further support planning your career.

Why work in AI policy?

A large number of the people we coach express interest in AI policy. We are also convinced that it could be very important. This is largely due to the catastrophic risk posed by very advanced AI systems that could be developed in the coming years and decades.

AI progress has been rapid over the last decade. Machine learning systems, which underlie modern artificial intelligence, have been increasingly successful in many previously-human-dominated areas. These include image and text generation, and decision making in complex environments. As these tools improve, the potential value of them being used well will also increases. AI could be used to revolutionise health care, science and deliver huge growth in productivity. As these systems become more powerful and we become more reliant on them, the cost of them failing to function as intended also increases. In the coming decades we may also be facing very advanced systems that could transform entire industries, deeply affect our day to day life and change the balance of power globally. These systems could pose an existential threat to human civilization.

The decisions that the government makes now and in the coming years could have huge implications on the future of AI. (e.g. because of inertia)

If you want to read more about why AI might be very important, please read this profile from 80,000 Hours (a career advice charity) and this guide to AI Safety from the Centre for Security & Emerging Technology (an American think tank).

This guide should be read together with our general guide on finding high impact teams in government. The teams we discuss here are not necessarily the highest impact for you to work in, and it might not be the right time for you to work on this directly.

Areas of AI policy in the UK government

The UK’s AI Strategy and AI Action Plan provide an overview of the areas that the UK government is planning to work on AI. The strategy describes 3 pillars.

• Pillar 1: Investing in the long-term needs of the AI ecosystem

  • Influencing the key economic variables underlying AI development

  • Making the UK competitive in AI

  • Maintaining access to computer chips needed to train and run AI (“compute”)

  • Building UK AI talent

• Pillar 2: Ensuring AI benefits all sectors and regions

  • Improving pathways to the commercialisation of AI products in more sectors

  • Increasing how successfully government and the broader public sector use AI

• Pillar 3: Governing AI effectively

  • Regulating the companies developing and using AI

  • Defining how AI will be used in defence

  • Setting an example for other powerful nations to develop and use AI safely and humanely

All these areas could be influential. We think that the most important places to work will be those teams that are working on policies that will have longer-term implications or affect the risks from very advanced systems.

Much of the government's current work is focused on more immediate issues regarding less advanced systems. If you think that the issues created by more advanced systems are the key reason to prioritise working in AI, we still think these teams may still be a particularly valuable place for you to work. This is because decisions and policies made today will affect how we are able to address future risks and may shape the strategic landscape in which AI is developed internationally. Working in this area will also give you the skills, knowledge and connections to be able to have a positive impact on AI policy long-term.

As well as considering whether a team’s work will affect the long-term we suggest that you reflect on your personal values and strengths. This will inform which team’s work is the highest priority for you.

Where to work in government

We have talked to a many civil servants and experts who work on AI policy to produce the list below. It’s bound to change over time, and to work on this policy area it is important to develop your own view about what is important and which teams are most relevant to your interests. A key way to do this will be to keep up to date with the work of the Office for AI and Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation in particular. They will likely continue to be the teams in government with the most complete overview of all AI related policy. You could also try to get in touch with these teams (if you are a civil servant we can help with this).

Core teams working directly on AI in the UK government:

The core areas of AI-specific work in government are the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI) which is part of Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS), the Office for AI (OAI), a joint BEIS-DCMS unit and the Office of Science & Technology Strategy (OSTS) in Cabinet Office.

Office for AI (OAI)

OAI is very AI-specific. They focus on making the UK more competitive in the AI space. This includes funding for PhDs, encouraging public sector use of AI, supporting AI sector growth, and improving the UK's approach to regulation. They also have a team that focuses more on AI-related risks, who “coordinate cross-government processes to accurately assess long term AI safety and risks…”

While the government “takes the long term risk of non-aligned Artificial General Intelligence, and the unforeseeable changes that it would mean for the UK and the world, seriously.”, current work largely focuses on AI risks and benefits from current, less advanced systems (such as automated decision making). However, even if you think that risks from very advanced systems are particularly important, we expect that this team is still particularly important.

The Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI)

CDEI is an advisory body to the UK government. It has a greater focus on ethics, responsible innovation, and safety than the Office for AI. The scope of CDEI’s work is also wider, including the use and misuse of data more broadly.

As an advisory body, they are slightly more removed from central government than OAI. They might therefore be a little less constrained by the need to deliver on immediate government priorities and able to explore more long term thinking. As with the Office for AI their work is mostly concerned with less advanced AI systems, such as autonomous vehicles and misinformation. CDEI’s work has also included working with the Ministry of Defence on how it uses AI safely.

The Office of Science & Technology Strategy (OSTS)

Currently, one of OSTS’s top four priorities is to help “focus [the UK’s] science and technology capabilities” to “[drive] growth and security through digital technologies that generate productivity across the whole economy”. As this team sits in the Cabinet Office – right in the centre of government – and is led by the Government Chief Science Advisor and a Deputy National Security Advisor, they will weigh in on many important decisions regarding the government's investment in and regulation of AI. The AI Strategy highlights that the Office for AI will work closely with the Office for Science and Technology Strategy in particular when trying to understand the government’s strategic goals for AI.

Other teams, departments and policy areas that will influence AI:

The above areas seem very promising for working directly on AI policy in the UK government. However, since AI is an extremely cross-cutting issue, there are teams across government that also have influence. These teams might influence AI policy areas such as:

• technology supply chains (e.g. semiconductor production)

• defence and national security technology development

• cutting-edge talent and commercial pipelines

• data policy and ethics

Here is a non-exhaustive list of other organisations, teams and policy areas that may play an important role:

• Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA)

  • ARIA is a newly set up agency that will fund "high-risk, high-reward" research.

  • The specifics of ARIAs funding strategy are uncertain, but may well include a substantial amount of research related to AI.

• Government Office for Science (GO-Science)

  • GO-Science provides key scientific advice to the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and other influential stakeholders, including the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).

  • They are more independent of ministers and policymaking than OSTS and seen as impartial and authoritative. It has multiple teams that sometimes work on AI or related issues. GO-Science is responsible for key scientific advice around National Security & Resilience, which will include advice relating to AI.

• Competitions and Market Authority (CMA)

  • The CMA works to reduce the negative effects of monopoly power within the UK economy. It also is responsible for consumer protection.

  • The Digital Markets Unit is particularly relevant: it tries to limit the undue market power of the largest tech companies (often leaders in AI). Some researchers think competition law could be particularly important for AI governance.

• The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and the Department for International Trade (DIT)

  • Both Departments will likely have influence over how other countries invest in and regulate AI, and in influencing key technology supply chains.

  • The more relevant roles will be those that relate to the UK’s relationship with states that regulate organisations working at the cutting-edge AI (the USA, China, and the EU).

• AI in Defence and National Security

  • The decisions made around Defence and National Security may be particularly important and set crucial precedents about the ethics of AI use. Particularly around automated decision making, risk assessment, surveillance and autonomous weaponry.

  • Ministry of Defence (MoD) recently published a Defence AI Strategy.

  • Specific defence teams that may be important for AI governance are those which are likely to play a role in how the UK embeds AI into strategic decision making processes, and the armed forces more generally. For example, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, the Defence Concepts and Doctrines Centre, the Defence AI and Autonomy Unit (see page 30), the Defence AI Centre, and Defence Digital.

  • Organisations such as GCHQ and the National Security Secretariat are currently establishing how AI should be used in their remits. The National Cyber Security Centre (part of GCHQ) in particular is working to advise government and industry about how to make AI systems secure.

  • National Security Strategic Investment Fund is a joint initiative between HM Government and the British Business Bank. They seek to accelerate the development of technology that could have national security and defence applications.

  • The Office of the Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security (currently Alex van Someren), will also likely be important.

• AI in healthcare and law enforcement:

  • Although many of the biggest risks and benefits from AI will be outside these areas, because they may be leader in the public sector use of AI, they may set precedents for how AI is used elsewhere.

  • For example, how the police and justice systems use AI required that we address a lot of important moral questions that we are yet to resolve.

Where you could work outside the Civil Service

We think the UK Civil Service is an impactful place to work to ensure that AI development is as positive as possible. However, there are lots of other places you could work on AI policy in the UK. These include:

• Alan Turing Institute (ATI)

  • ATI is an independent research institute focusing on AI. It was set up by the UK government and has stronger ties to policy making than many academic institutions.

  • The AI policy team may be a high impact place to positively affect AI policy in the UK and elsewhere.

  • They have recently set up the Centre for Emerging Technology and Security to conduct research that will inform UK security policy around AI and other emerging technology

• Ada Lovelace Institute (ALI)

  • ALI is an independent research institute, focused on ensuring "the benefits of data and AI must be justly and equitably distributed"

  • A lot of their work looks at how the government and other power institutions can use AI ethically.

• Centre for the Governance of AI (GovAI)

  • GovAI is a research organisation working on policy ideas to improve the governance of AI. Their research interests include both UK and global governance.

• Centre for Long Term Resilience (CLTR)

  • CLTR has worked closely with the government to develop policy proposals that could mitigate risks from AI. These are outlined in their report, Future Proof.

Next steps for you

Decide on your priorities

As we have suggested above, we think that teams and organisations that might be most important are those that will impact future policy making (e.g. by setting precedents). We also expect that roles closer to “the centre'' might offer more opportunity to improve the most crucial decisions.

However , if you are relatively early in your career the most important consideration might be around which team or role will provide you with the greatest opportunity for personal growth. It’s possible that you should currently be focussing on building your skills and knowledge of the AI policy space, and getting to better know the key people, teams and organisations.

We encourage you to make your own mind up about what is most important and best fits with your strengths.

Look out for jobs in these teams and talk to them

The key way to look for jobs in these teams is to carefully set up your job alerts on Civil Service jobs. We have written previously about how you can optimise your job alerts. If you think you might want to work in this area, we recommend that you start reading these job descriptions and reaching out to hiring managers to learn more about their work (even if you don't plan to apply immediately).

Talk to us

If you are interested in moving your career towards working in AI policy, we would love to talk to you. Sign up for coaching with us and we can help you think through your options!

As we expect this policy area to move quickly, the landscape outlined above will also likely change over the coming months and years. We’d like to keep this post up-to-date, so please let us know if you notice anything incorrect or out-of-date. Email contact@impactfulgovcareers.org.

Key Bibliography

• 80,000 hours career profile on preventing AI related catastrophes

• The National AI strategy and AI action plan

• Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation articles about AI

• Centre for Long Term Resilience’s Future Proof

Working in policy teaches you to understand systems. But it also involves working in and being part of a system: the UK Civil Service. And as you spend time in that system you may start to notice all the little cracks, all the ways it does not quite work or can lead to bad decisions being made.

I joined the Civil Service (HM Treasury) in 2012 and I started to notice the cracks. I noticed there was a lack of class diversity in the Treasury, with good staff from poor backgrounds being pushed out. I noticed how Overseas Development Aid funds received scrutiny and oversight when being spent by the Department for International Development (DFID) but not when being spent by other departments. Yet now, a decade later, these things are changing. The Cabinet Office has started tracking departments’ class diversity statistics, and the Independent Commission for Aid Impact increased its scrutiny of non-DFID aid spending (before the DFID merger with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office). None of this because of me: some people, somewhere, were seeing the problems and fixing them.

Sure, sometimes it is two steps forward and one back. But our system gets better, in both big and small ways. We have a better functioning government and Civil Service in the 2020s than we did in the 1920s, and we will be better still in the future. It is improving because people are seeing and fixing the cracks.

And you can play a part in that. As a civil servant you are allowed to try to fix things.

As with any change, you may get some pushback, but the Modern Civil Service approach champions those who genuinely try to improve things, to innovate, to make their workplaces function well. Furthermore, trying to make such changes will in many cases be good for your career, you will engage with senior stakeholders and build interesting behaviour stories.

Story: After I graduated from pharmacy school I went in to my first job as a very junior intern pharmacist at St Vincent’s Hospital ... I started trying to figure out how I could improve the workflow of all of the other people that I worked with ... I figured out that pharmacists were spending 30% of their time on these kind of ad hoc drug requests which meant that that was time that they weren’t spending with their patients ... So what I did was to try to link hospital admissions data to the pharmacy dispensing system so that we could predict how much we would use of various different antibiotics or other drugs at different places in the hospital at different times and make sure that those lifesaving drugs never went out of stock ... My colleagues at the hospital were all astounded at what I did and they were like, “This isn’t your job, why are you doing this? Why are you putting in so much effort? Who is allowing you to do this?” And the thing that I said is, “You don’t need permission. You don’t need to be allowed to do something that’s not in your job description if you think that it’s gonna make your company or your organization more successful and more efficient, you can often just go and do it.” (Source).

Contents

• About this guide

• Step 1: Understand what needs to change

• Step 2: Understand how the system is changed

• Step 3: Create the space for action

• Step 4: Fix things that you can fix

• Step 5: Work with others – build a group of collaborators

• Step 6: Involve senior staff

• Limitations

• Final words

About this guide

This is a guide on how to improve the system from the inside. This could range from changing the rules and protocols which your organisation uses to function and make decisions, to changing the culture and ethos of your organisation and the way things work in practice.

This guide was written by UK civil servants for UK civil servants with a focus on improving the UK Civil Service, though we hope much of it will be applicable to other contexts and other countries too. It is written for civil servants working across all areas of government, not just for those few staff who happen to have Civil Service reform topics explicitly in their job description. It is primarily written for junior civil servants (those not in the Senior Civil Service).

The guide is split into 6 key steps (each split into 2-5 substeps). Depending on what you want to change, not every step is always necessary. Nor do the steps need to be carried out in the order given. Sometimes after understanding a problem (Step 1) you can just fix a problem yourself (Step 4), and sometimes you need collaborators (Step 5) to work with you. For some changes senior staff buy-in (Step 6) is not necessary yet other times senior staff buy-in to the change is the change, and once they have agreed then the problem will be fixed.

There are of course limits to what you can and should change working from inside the system. These are discussed at the end of the guide.

This guide is about improving the functioning of government systems, not about trying to influence policy by working in government. Civil servants can definitely have a direct positive effect on policy by working in policy areas that they care about and by doing their job well. See our separate guides on Where to work in government and How to have an impact by doing your job well in government.

Note: stories are anonymous and from a variety of sources.

Step 1: Understand what needs to change

Take your time. A significant chunk of time should be invested in understanding the problem. Do not try to change things immediately after beginning a new job, or starting in a new department. If you have just joined the Civil Service, give it 6 months. You’ll need this time to understand why things are the way they are and the written and unwritten workplace rules, and to decide which problems should be fixed, and what solutions should be tried.

Understand the systems you are in

Be observant. Keep notes and records of things that are or are not working for you or other people. Talk to your colleagues, ask them about their gripes and what they would change. Think about where you can add value.

Learn relevant topics. Learn about systems thinking, organisational design, diversity and inclusion best practice, and so on. Read around these topics and try to find examples of best practices and well functioning systems that you can compare your workplace to.

Prioritise. Brainstorm ideas. You may end up with a very long list of things you wished would function better. Think about the things you want to change and prioritise between them. Make sure the thing you are working on is the highest value thing you can focus limited energy onto. Your top priorities might be the changes that you think would have the greatest impact on the civil service and society at large, but how tractable and achievable the changes are may also be relevant. (For more on this see the section on prioritisation in our career guide).

Story: Every 3 months I would take a few hours out, away from my desk, and list all the things I was working on at the minute. I included both the day to day work and the corporate objective projects I had. I would then try to ignore the day to day pressures and just prioritise them by which I thought would be having the biggest impact on the world. This was helpful for me to adjust my time towards what mattered most.

Understand why the system is not working and why it has not been fixed.

If it looks like a system is broken, maybe it is, but maybe it is actually that way for a good reason. (See: Chesterton’s fence). Remember not everything that looks broken needs to be fixed, and not everything that needs to be fixed is for you to work on. Before trying to change something try to understand:

• Why the system is the way it is

• The good reasons, the legitimate reasons the responsible staff have for not fixing it

• The bad reasons, the misaligned incentives that may stop the responsible staff from fixing it

• How it may have already been changed and why that might not have worked

This will help you decide if this is something to fix as well as help you understand (and later influence) the incentives of those who might have a say in fixing it.

Have evidence. If there is a problem you want to fix, make sure you have evidence that it is actually a problem, that it has some cost to the Civil Service, to taxpayers or to staff. Collect data and anecdotes. Also seek evidence that solutions are possible, such as examples from other departments or other countries or external think tank research. (When searching for solutions, remember that money is guarded and it is often easier to affect processes rather than funding.) And once you start changing things, track impact – collect stories of how your change helped save money or support staff and so on. Evidence will be particularly useful for persuading senior staff to engage with the problem.

Story: When I joined the Civil Service I was interested in encouraging people to give more to effective charities. I joined an existing group focused on workplace giving. I remember being embarrassed at a meeting by suggesting that we make charitable giving opt-out for all staff, an idea that would clearly never fly. After that I kept my suggestions to myself for a few months, volunteered to help others, and worked out what practically I could change. A while later, when I volunteered to find ways to make Payroll Giving easier and to put advice on the intranet on how to give effectively, everyone agreed and encouraged me to make those changes.

Step 2: Understand how the system is changed

Volunteer. If new to the Civil Service or a department, spend some time with the people there who are already changing things in ways seen as legitimate. There will always be such people doing volunteer corporate stuff slightly outside the standard day to day jobs. For example, you could volunteer to help with:

• LGBT networks, Capability Action Network, or other diversity groups

• Carer’s network or other support groups

• Organisational changes, such as the panel of people smoothing the implementation of the new IT system, or similar.

You could also try to work in roles that involve setting up new teams or otherwise making planned organisational changes.

Identify precedents. Look at how change has happened in the past. Look for groups or people with unusual roles and work out how they came to be. Talk to your department’s Innovation Team if there is one. Learn generally about Civil Service reform, how change has happened, and what has worked and not worked to date.

Story: I wanted to talk to other civil servants about how to have more impact in our careers. I had been going to the Civil Service weekly Jewish ‘lunch and learn’ events and thought that they created a good network. So following that precedent I decided to set up a similar lunch and learn event for civil servants interested in Effective Altruism.

Step 3: Create the space for action

Make sure you are doing your day job well. Your day to day work still matters. This might be the biggest thing that will get in your way – if you cannot do your day job to a reasonable standard then your manager or someone else is likely to block you from driving other changes. Furthermore, performing badly on the day to day work will reflect poorly on you and the others who are trying to change things with you.

Add the change you are working on to your objectives. Make it part of your day job. Most departments and managers will allow you to have a corporate objective that takes up to 10% of your time and is unconnected to your day work. If there is something you want to change then broach the subject with your manager and make the case that it is valuable and that adding it to your annual objectives will be good for your development.

Story: I wanted there to be better career coaching for junior civil servants. I started looking into coaching techniques, and began running career coaching sessions for people I knew, and then for others. I talked to my manager about this and explained it would be good for my career. He not only agreed to add it to my corporate objective but also said that the team training budget could be used to send me on a course on coaching skills.

Step 4: Fix things that you can fix

Start to fix things. At some point you need to start changing the things you can change. Start small if you need to: lead by example and change things in your team or area of work. You can always reach out to other staff or senior staff later to spread the change.

Ask for forgiveness not permission. Before taking an action, carefully think through the consequences and risks. But if in doubt about whether you can or should do something, take action! Sometimes if you try to ask for permission you will be stuck in limbo for ages as you wait for a response from people, or they may be risk averse and tell you ‘No, let’s stick with the status quo’. Yet no one wants to be the person to tell someone that they should not have done a good thing, after they’ve done it! You have more autonomy than you realise.

Story: A civil servant wanted to make her department work better. She spent a while talking to other staff to work out what bothered them most and what could be fixed. One thing that came up is that new staff got lost or confused when trying to find other staff’s desks in the broad open plan office. So she thought of a numbering system for the desks, got hold of a labelling device and went around and labelled the desks with numbers. She did not ask permission first, she just went out and corrected a problem she saw.

Step 5: Work with others – build a group of collaborators

Network. It is easier to change things or to spread your change more widely across the Civil Service if you have collaborators. Go to networking and social events; get to know your colleagues and make friends at work. Consider going to IGC events and One Team Gov events to network with innovative change makers across government. Consider the teams and senior staff it may be good to reach or have support from. Build a broad base of connections with the junior people in those teams (they may not even be in your department).

Network with senior staff too. For example, get to know your Director or find a senior staff member to be your mentor.

As you get more buy-in and build credibility, consider also writing blogs for your government intranet (or even for groups like Apolitical) about what you are trying to do. You can also speak at events such as team meetings or Civil Service Live, and suggest that people interested in collaborating with you should get in touch.

Build a group of collaborators. Find people you can work with who want to change and improve the same things as you, and build them into a mini-team. Invite them to take part and let their views shape what you are working on. Give people clear roles, responsibilities and actions to take, whilst recognising the time constraints that their day jobs place on them.

Story: I wanted to run training courses for civil servants on how to make career decisions. So I did. I wrote the course, tested it, and ran it. (I did not ask permission, there was no push back, and senior civil servants seemed happy that this was happening). Then I started getting the people who turned up to re-run it in their departments, and so it spread.

Step 6: Involve senior staff

Slowly build credibility. Showcase your expertise: for example, by changing something small that everyone agrees needs to be changed before moving onto something bigger. Toot your own horn: for example, talk about what you have done at a team meeting or write on internal blogs. Use your senior allies to build credibility or amplify your message to other senior staff.

Work out who to talk to. Work out what levers can be pulled to drive change and which civil servants might be interested in the change you are making. This could be people in your management chain, or people with particular responsibilities (e.g. Heads of Civil Service professions) or people in other teams or even other departments who could fix the problem (analyst teams, Cabinet Office staff, etc). Remember that not everyone will have time for you. Look for senior civil servants with a reputation for being innovative or different (if you are not sure, talk to their junior staff). In some cases you might also consider getting support from trusted credible senior stakeholders outside government, such as ex-senior civil servants or a trusted think tank (like the Institute for Government).

Consider proposing a process not a solution. People often don’t like being confronted with a solution – especially if it comes from someone more junior than them. They need time to get used to the idea that there is a problem, and to get used to potential solutions. Creating a process avoids asking anyone to commit to anything at the beginning and it only needs a certain amount of recognition that there might be a problem. A ‘process’ might have some or all of: a name, a group of people working on it, possibly some senior oversight, an agreed set of questions to look into, an identified recipient of the findings, a series of meetings over a period of time, possibly some consultation with external experts (or internally, people in other parts of government), and a report at the end with some recommendations. The process itself has legitimacy, it gives people confidence that proposals for change are coming from some deliberation, not off the top of people’s heads and when the recommendations finally come out, the fact that there has been a process makes it harder to ignore."

Sell your problem and process/solution. Understand what the senior civil servants you are talking to want (if you are not sure, talk to their junior staff). Understand their capability, opportunity and motivation (COM) for acting. Remember to appeal both to senior civil servants incentives for improved systems, but also to their personal (or even misaligned) incentives, such as looking good, selling their policy area, or having control over a bigger pot of resources.

Be humble. Remember you do not have all the answers. You may have identified an important problem which, if fixed, could make the government run better. However, you still may not know all the reasons for it. It may be helpful to have some suggestions to demonstrate that solutions are possible, but trying to find the solution to a complex problem is almost certainly a joint effort that needs to involve others and their expertise. This likely includes seeking input from the senior civil servants you are engaging with.

Story: We were running these training courses for other civil servants and wanted to make it more formal and maybe find capacity for someone to do it full time. So, we arranged to be on a panel at Civil Service Live about innovators in government. From there we met a Director who liked what we were doing. We asked and she said maybe her team could support us. She put us in touch with her Deputy Director. We pitched our ideas to her and she offered to help us.

Limitations

It is worth flagging some of the limitations of driving change from the inside.

There is a limit to how much you can change things from the inside. Big changes to governance systems need external or political pressure. From the inside you can probably play a role in bigger changes if there happens to be public or think tank pressure or political reasons for the change to be made

Change is slow. On rare occasions, it’s possible to change things very quickly. But bigger changes can often be very slow. Say you want to be allowed to put 50% of your work hours into running a training project you set up for other civil servants. You might find you need to get sign-off from: your manager, your director, PermSec, legal, HR, comms, Civil Service training, and so on. This could take months even if it goes smoothly; and in the meantime a change of Director could cause you to have to restart, or even scrap, the whole process.

You might fail. Finally, remember that making changes requires a lot of luck and being at the right place at the right time. You will not always succeed to change the things you want to change, and that is also OK. You will learn and maybe be a bit luckier and more skilled next time.

Story: I had this idea that we could have better Ministers if the annual Civil Service People Survey included questions about Ministers’ decision making, and the answers were aggregated and provided to No.10 so that the PM could make better calls about which Ministers were doing a good job. It might just be possible for a motivated grade 7 with the right connections to drive that kind of change, but it was a bit beyond me.

Final words

Go create the change you want to see. Trying to improve things can be good for you, your career, your organisation, the country and the world. You likely have more permission and more autonomy to do this than you realise. It will not always be easy but it can be done.

Good luck!!

A final story: As a junior civil servant, an HEO, I noticed our policy team barely spoke to our analysts. We were introducing massive reforms without any performance indicators. I volunteered to come up with the indicators. I created a virtual team of G7 policy people and analysts and got them working together on these measures. The team created a new impact report that went up to the Investment Committee as a pilot, and then got shared around the department as good practice. Other divisions followed suit. Policy people in my division felt more comfortable with the analysts and the culture changed – they started being involved in policy from the start, coming to meetings. Eventually they joined our division, and became a fundamental part of our team and work. I can’t take credit for all that, but seeing a problem and pro-actively trying to change the culture did have knock on effects.

Was this article useful for you? Did you try to change your organisation from the inside? Did you follow these steps? If so we would love to hear. Please get in touch with us at contact@impactfulgovcareers.org or leave a comment below.

Where you choose to work is very important

When I was a kid I wanted to be a clown. I loved making people laugh, and would paint my face and dress up at every opportunity. My career goals moved away from clowning at some point in my early teens. I am not that sad about this... I suspect I would have been a fine clown, but I don't think that area of work would have offered that much opportunity to work on big, important problems in our society.

It's not that being a clown is completely unimpactful. Working in a circus would have provided entertainment to people, making them laugh, and improving their lives. It's just that there are many more opportunities to help others much much more that this. I am sure that a big part of me would have felt deeply dissatisfied with this relative lack of social impact sooner or later.

Where you work is very important. You could be the best civil servant in the world, but if you work in teams, that are less influential or are working on less important problems, you could have a tiny fraction of your potential social impact.

At Impactful Government Career, we’ve previously talked a lot about how you can start to explore yourself, your values and Civil Service. We think it’s crucially important to reflect deeply on your own values in particular. What specific issues do you think are most important? Why do you think those are important? What is the government doing in connection with those issues? And how can you help?

How we want to help you think about this

This is the first of several posts on “where to work in government to have a social impact”. This post covers some general ideas on finding high impact teams. Future posts will cover specific policy areas (listed below). We will talk about which departments and teams appear to be good places to have a positive social impact in those policy areas. We picked these areas based on conversations with the people we coach and our own thoughts on which areas seem particularly important. We expect to cover the following policy areas in the coming months:

• Artificial Intelligence

• Biological security

• Climate change

• International policy and diplomacy

• Risk management

• Government decision making

• Mental health

• Animal welfare

• Civil Service improvement

If you would like us to cover another policy area that you are interested in - please get in contact with us to discuss!

In this, and future articles on policy areas, we’re going to be a little more opinionated about what we suspect are the areas that seem particularly pressing. But we also want to leave as much space as possible for you to think about what you see as the most pressing problems in the country and world. So please take these ideas lightly and think hard about how our thoughts relate to what matters to you.

You might be thinking “does this mean that you think some policy areas are just simply more important than others?”. Our answer is “yes and no”. For a given person deciding between roles, this is absolutely true. If you care deeply about climate change, for example, then jobs that relate to climate issues are more important than those that relate to some other policy area. We also have opinions about this, based on our own thinking. But we are not saying that there is an objective ranking of policy areas or that some work is intrinsically less important. You need to decide what’s important to you.

The below list of ideas is intended for civil servants. If you are not a civil servant yet, the main piece of advice is going to be just get a job in the Civil Service first. Once you are inside, you’ll be able to start looking for other roles more clearly. As a civil servant you’ll have a better sense of your fit for this work, you’ll have a network that can help you, and you will have access to the other half of jobs that only civil servants can apply for.

Rule 1. Early in your career, prioritise personal growth and exploration

For those who’ve joined the government recently, you might want to move into an exciting area and have a big impact as soon as possible. It’s great to start thinking about this early, but moving too quickly could jeopardize your long-term impact.

We suspect there are two main risks in moving into a policy area that seems important too quickly:

You might end up neglecting personal growth in favour of short-term impact.

We expect your impact potential will increase throughout your career, so early on, the question should be more “how can I become amazing at tackling important problems” and "what approach will mean I have the most impact with my whole career" rather than “how can I have as much impact as soon as possible”.

You might specialise in the wrong policy area

It might be costly if you move into an impactful seeming area before you’ve got a sense of what is most important. Many people change their mind about what the most important problems are, especially early on.

The counterpoint to the above might be that if you are very confident that an area is your top priority, getting in and starting to build deep expertise early, could be worth it.

Rule 2, Prioritise personal fit with the role and team

There are many very impressive teams working on important issues across the government. When you start thinking about your career in terms of the impact you could have, it can be tempting to just try and find the most impactful team and just aim to work there. It’s easy to neglect how much a role or team might fit with your personal strengths. This might be one of the most important considerations when figuring out if a position is going to allow you to have as much social impact as you want.

You might therefore want to ask these kinds of questions and then consider how you feel about the answer:

• What are specific tasks that you’ll spend most of your time doing?

• Is the work fast-paced or slow-paced?

• Will you mostly be working alone or closely with teammates?

• How much will you be using the skills you have developed so far in your career?

These are just examples of specific questions. The core idea here is to try and assess whether you are going to be happy in the role and feel like you are really good at it.

Rule 3. Work closely with influential decision makers

Much of the work of civil servants is about advising senior decision makers. These are often ministers, but might also be parliamentarians, or senior civil servants. Impact in a role is likely going to correlate strongly with proximity to people who have influence. Which influential people you want to work closely with will depend on your priorities. You might, for example, want to try and work closely with a minister with a particular remit. You might also consider working in a role in “the centre”.

For all policy areas - working in the centre might be impactful. The centre usually refers to Cabinet Office (CO), Number 10 and the Treasury (HMT). HMT and CO are fairly big and diverse though (especially CO which now has 11,000 people). So the specific team there will make a big difference. Central teams that seem important to consider include:

• The CO secretariat (Civil Contingencies Secretariat, National Securities Secretariat and the Economic and Domestic Affair Secretariat)

• The spending teams in HMT - the team that oversees an area that you think is important is likely a high impact area to work in for most policy areas.

In March 2020, there were a number of teams working across government on pandemic preparedness and outbreak control. Prior to the first lockdown, as the reality of the need to make big decisions around Covid 19 became clear, a lot of the decision making moved into Number 10. The people working across government ended up being less influential than the team at the centre. Dynamics like this are important to be aware of. This might imply that it's better, for some policy areas, to just be in the centre, helping the most influential decision makers prioritise. (which might include working to make sure that those policy-area experts from across government are included in important decisions)

You might decide that you can have more impact in a less central role. Even so, it might still be worth spending some time in HMT, CO or No. 10. These institutions affect all policy areas, so building an intuition for how politicians, advisors and civil servants in the centre think, will be invaluable anywhere.

Rule 4. Think about the future of the area

The remits of departments change a lot. See the below graph of “Machinery of Government” changes from this 2019 report from the Institute for Government. The changes at the level of the directorate, division, or team are even more common.

When moving into a new area, having a sense of where the team is heading is crucial. You should expect to have the most impact once you’ve been around for a while. If the team is not going to really exist in a year, then it is probably not a great opportunity.

Some areas are likely to grow or shrink based on political priorities and budget changes. Some points in time are also particularly crucial for a given area. Perhaps, for example, the details of a crucial, and long-lasting piece of legislation are being worked on in a policy area. It might therefore be much more important to work in that area now than it was a year ago, or will be in a year.

It’s also worth considering the idea of “Punctuated equilibrium” from this research from Paul Cairney. He argues that in most policy areas, most of the time, very little changes. Then suddenly the area gets attention and everything changes very quickly. The career strategy here might therefore be to think about what parts of the policy area are set to be in the spotlight in a few years. Getting in there now and figuring out what good policy looks like, might be particularly valuable.

Rule 5. Find supportive and empowering teams and managers

The Civil Service is a generally nice place to work, with a good culture and employee engagement. But a-not-insignificant number of teams are poorly led, contain bad managers or are generally bad places to work or try to have an impact. A team might be working on important issues, but if you feel unsupported, micromanaged or miserable you are unlikely to have as much impact as you would in a better team.

We suggest trying very hard to find out whether a team you are considering working in is a good place to work. Can you find anyone who has recently left the team that you can talk to? Is there someone who has worked closely with the team that might be able to shed some light? You often have very little to go on when deciding to accept an offer, so use your intuition. If the vibe when talking to the manager feels off, listen to that feeling.

After a few months in the role, ask yourself whether you are happy there. If the answer is a clear no, then start looking elsewhere. Even if the team seems high impact, there will be other opportunities in other teams that will support you to both feel good and have impact. We also suspect that people overestimate the costs of quitting jobs early (because it’s not that important to future employers). If it feels bad, find a way out.

Rule 6. Look outside the Civil Service

There are many great, important roles that could use your skills outside government. We talk to lots of people who have spent years in the government and are unaware of how valuable their skills are elsewhere. Even just within policy there will be think tanks, NGOs, and research organisations that would highly value your skills and experience. Here are some job boards that might be worth checking out.

Rule 7. Talk to us about your plans

If you want to talk to us about how these ideas relate to your career plans - sign up for free career coaching here. And if you haven’t already, sign up to our mailing list to hear about future posts about where you can have an impact in government.

“I feel as though I'm sitting in a Rolls Royce and I don't know how to make it move”

- Tony Blair (during his first term as Prime Minister)

When you work in government, it’s easy to think that the real power lies elsewhere. But every civil servant has huge potential to change the country – and the world – for the better.

This post is about how to have a positive social impact through excelling at your job in the UK Civil Service. It is the third part in our Impactful Government Career Guide. For information on how to decide on and move into the right role for you, see our other guides here:

• Career Guide Part 1 – What makes a good career

• Career Guide Part 2 – Finding the right career for you: explore progress and have impact.

• Future articles in this guide will cover: building key skills, how to improve the systems from the inside, and dealing with bad managers. To stay up-to-date, join the mailing list here

This guide is based on in-depth research including: an analysis of the literature about the UK Civil Service, interviews with civil servants at junior and senior grades, and feedback from civil servants who applied earlier versions of this advice in their jobs.

If you care about the impact of your work in government, this guide is for you. This advice aims to help you to do your job well, to prioritise the needs of citizens, and to go above and beyond to create a better UK and a better world.

Outline

• Start with yourself

  • Set boundaries and care for yourself

  • Improve your productivity

  • Get good feedback

• Understand social impact

  • Some actions are much, much more impactful than others

  • A lot of luck is involved

  • You should consider your counterfactual impact

  • Take this further:

    • Looking into Effective Altruism

• Understand the Civil Service

  • Learn how to navigate the labyrinth

  • Understand the unwritten rules of the Civil Service

  • Take this further:

    • Learn about bureaucracies

    • Observe successful people

• Sell yourself and your team

  • Get known for being really good

  • Take this further:

    • Get the endorsement, money and people that you need

    • Map out and prioritise your stakeholders

    • Be strategic about how you persuade others

• Build up your team

  • Surround yourself with great, mission-aligned people

  • Take this further:

    • Become a great manager

• Counteract common flaws of the Civil Service

  • Understand where things could be better

  • Speak truth to power

• Understand your policy areas REALLY well

  • Develop deep expertise

• Identify and take opportunities for impact

  • Say no to less important work

  • Take this further

    • Analyse your job

• Develop and improve your systems

  • Understand, engage, prioritise

  • Help your team understand the system better

  • Build a good theory of change

  • Help your team prioritise better

  • Take this further

    • Building systems with self-improvement built-in

• Closing remarks

  • You’ll never be perfect - but you can still do a lot!

  • Recognise the impact you have

  • Go out and start doing things

Start with yourself

Set boundaries and care for yourself

Having impact in your career is a marathon, not a sprint. You can also just stop running if you need to. Look after yourself first.

This means setting boundaries with your work, and not pushing yourself too hard, for too long. You do not need to work more than your contracted hours to have an impact in government. It’s ok to say no to things that overburden you. Build robust healthy habits, get plenty of sleep, and nurture close personal relationships outside of work. Pay attention to any warning signs of burnout, and try to avoid managers who are not sensitive to your wellbeing. Make caring for your mental or physical health a top priority. Remember that it’s legitimate to take time off for stress and mental health if you need to.

Having an impact should not cost you your wellbeing. Helping others is important, but that does not mean that it should be put in front of your other physical and psychological needs. Furthermore, if you invest time and (possibly) money in improving these fundamentals, this will enable you to make faster progress in other areas.

Improve your productivity

Improving your productivity is about buying yourself space to be able to prioritise more and step out of the whirlwind of urgent requests, and the hyperactive hivemind. The internet is full of ideas about how to be more productive and not all will work for you, so here is a tool that takes you through some of the most effective productivity techniques. I recommend looking into the productivity framework Getting Things Done, and the key ideas in Cal Newport’s Deep Work.

Get good feedback

You need to make sure to build feedback loops that allow you to build on your successes. This means creating regular opportunities to review how things have gone and identify specific ways you can improve. You will likely have regular reviews with your manager, but you can go further than this. Figure out what ways of receiving feedback work best for you. Get feedback from a wide variety of people in different contexts. Consider setting up a personal weekly review, in which you ask yourself what you've done, what you did well, and what you can improve.

Story from a civil servant

When I was working in Treasury, I noticed that a colleague of mine always managed to leave at 5. I remember I asked him about it one day. He said that our team is understaffed; he has enough work for two people, and there is more to do than can be done. He said that if he tried to complete the work and didn’t stick to his hours, he would never leave. The way he dealt with that pressure was to be focused and work hard in the day but to always leave on time.

Understand Social impact

If you want to have a positive social impact, it’s important to know what impact looks like. People try to improve the world in many ways - for example, perhaps at some point in your life you’ve given to charity, attended protests about issues you care about, or volunteered. Now, you want to do good in your career as well as your personal life. But if you have several ideas about how to have a positive social impact, which should you prioritise? Research into this question suggests that:

Some actions are much, much more impactful than others

If you care about climate change, what should you do? People often suggest that if you want to reduce your carbon footprint, you should try to reuse plastic bags and reduce the amount you fly. But how much do these things really help, and how do they compare in terms of impact? Benjamin Todd writes: ‘Convincing someone to entirely give up plastic bags for the rest of their life (about 10,000 bags) would avoid about 0.1 tonnes of CO2 emissions. In contrast, convincing someone to take just one fewer transatlantic flight would reduce CO2 emissions by over one tonne — more than 10 times as much.’

Things are similar in many areas where you might try to have a positive social impact. For example, researchers into interventions for AIDS found that education for high-risk groups was 25 times more effective than antiretroviral therapy. In other words, impact tends to be ‘heavy-tailed’ - most positive impact comes from just a few interventions. Impact is likely also very unevenly distributed over the course of your career. It’s possible that the majority of the impact you will have over your life will come from a single week of work - so it’s important to prioritise well.

A lot of luck is involved

The impact you have will depend on many factors, some of which won’t be under your control. Opportunities to have a large impact can appear without warning. It’s therefore important to have the systems in place to spot these opportunities.

You should consider your counterfactual impact

When thinking about your impact, you should consider the counterfactual - that is, you should not only think about what you do, but also what would have happened if you hadn’t been involved. For example, would someone else have done exactly the same thing as you, if you hadn’t been there? Given that you were hired for your role, it’s likely that you’re the best candidate. As such, you are likely to have some positive impact on the world simply by doing your job to the best of your ability: the other candidates who applied would probably have done it less well (otherwise they’d have been hired!). But you can have even more impact if you make positive outcomes a central focus of your time in the role.

Take this further:

Look into Effective Altruism

Effective altruism (EA) is a philosophy and community focused on maximising the good you do through your career, projects, and donations. Particularly useful ideas from EA include: approaches to prioritisation such as the scale, neglectedness, solvability framework, a focus on low likelihood outcomes that can be very good or very bad, and a focus on expected value (as opposed to the value of the most likely outcome).

Story from a civil servant

I spent a while learning more about social impact and spending time talking to people from the Effective Altruism (EA) community outside of work. The community is very interested in which charities can demonstrate the most impact using evidence. This led me to learn a lot about how social impact is understood and measured outside government. One set of ideas that I learned here was the idea of using “natural experiments'', which can help us figure out the realities of cause and effect in a complex system. Around the same time, I noticed a program that I was working on had no way of assessing its impact. I brought up the idea of using a natural experiment to assess whether the program's work was having the desired effect. The policy team I was working with really liked this idea and it was accepted as the evaluation method for the program. We then started collecting the necessary data to assess the impact of the program. We planned to use this new assessment method that I learned from the EA community.

Understand the Civil Service

As a civil servant, your role is to serve the Minister of the day. You will have specific objectives within your specific role. But it is also important to understand how the government functions more broadly. This will allow you to navigate systems, notice opportunities and avoid costly mistakes.

For example, it might be useful to understand:

• The Ministerial and Civil Service codes

• How Parliament works - bills, committees and the roles of MPs

• Finance, accounting and value for money in government departments

• Accountability, governance, and the role of audit in government

• The structure of the Civil Service

• The roles of devolved administration, arms length bodies, and regulators.

• The roles and relationships of Number 10, Treasury, Cabinet Office, and central functions

• The judiciary, particularly the judicial review process

You don’t need to have a complete understanding of these immediately. Depending on your role, some of these will be more or less important, so you will need to prioritise your learning.

A lot of these topics will be covered in the basic introductory and induction training courses that are available in your department. There are likely additional short courses on various topics such as judicial review, the role of parliament and so on. Search for these courses on your intranet, Civil Service Learning, or ask a colleague.

Learn how to navigate the labyrinth

To do well in the Civil Service, you need to do more than just achieve your objectives and keep to the Civil Service code. You’ll need to navigate confusion, disagreement and internal politics. This is not to say that the UK Civil Service is broken: far from it! The UK Civil Service is one of the best in the world, and forms the backbone of a highly functioning government. But all organisations contain bluffers, unwritten rules, and flawed organisational ideologies that you will need to understand to be able to have the most impact.

Understand the unwritten rules of the Civil Service

Reading about how the Civil Service is supposed to work can only take you so far: in reality, the system is likely more complicated, more flawed and more illegible than any resource directly suggests. You’ll need to understand both how the system is intended to work, and how it actually works in practice.

A first step we recommend:

When you’re at work, keep an eye out for places where how things work is different from the theory, or where things might be going wrong. You might notice that who has the most influence over what areas differs a bit from your team’s organogram. Or you might realise that there are several senior colleagues on a program’s board, but they vary significantly in how invested they seem to be. Ask yourself what is going on here and what it implies about what the people around you really care about, or ask them directly if you are able. Each week, make a note of your observations.

Take this further

Learn about bureaucracies

Spend some time learning about how bureaucracies in general tend to function (or not function), and build a broad understanding of “what happens when tens of thousands of people try to coordinate on fulfilling an ever-changing set of competing objectives?”. A few places to start here are: Coordination Headwinds, Seeing Like a State, and Moral Mazes.

Observe successful people

Learn more about what makes individuals successful in the Civil Service by talking to or observing successful individuals. Identify the people who seem to be most successful, and see what they focus on most, and which skills they are best at. However, bear in mind that if you just straightforwardly ask people why they’re successful, they’ll probably give you an incorrect answer unless they have already thought about it carefully (and most people haven’t). It’s more effective if you ask them questions about their career history and their underlying beliefs about the system, and infer from their answers what caused their success. Consider also reading biographies and memoirs of people who have been successful in government (for example Jeremy Heywood and Gavin Barwell).

Sell yourself and your team

Get known for being really good

This is crucially important in all Civil Service jobs. This is directly useful because:

• You are unlikely to have much impact alone. To get things done in a complex organisation, you need to rely on others and have others rely on you. You will have the most impact through your teams and wider stakeholder networks.

This is also useful for your career because:

• You’ll be noticed and recognised as someone who excels at their work and is trustworthy and competent. This will allow you to build a strong network, making you more likely to find good opportunities, promotions and high impact jobs to work on in future.

To get things done in a massive bureaucracy, you will need to build a network of stakeholders who really trust your ability and judgement. The most straightforward way to do this is to get really good at the job in front of you, using your strengths and your understanding. Alongside this, build relationships with people: make it clear to others that you can be trusted to deliver. In a complex and often ambiguous environment like the government, it can be hard to develop high-trust relationships. Developing these relationships is really valuable if you want to get things done.

It’s important to not only be actually competent, but also to “sell” yourself, your work and your team. However, it’s also important not to take this too far. Some individuals and teams in the Civil Service bluff their way through, without really delivering anything substantive.

Resist the temptation to present yourself as completely confident in your approach. Instead, instill confidence in stakeholders by being aware of and honest about your uncertainties and the gaps in your understanding, and telling them how you intend to address those uncertainties. (Nate Soares has called this “confidence all the way up”.)

A first step we recommend:

Look out for opportunities to tell your stakeholders and senior staff about the good work you and your team are doing. For example ensure that the regular team newsletter has a paragraph on the work you have done and how it has helped. Or use your regular team updates as an opportunity to celebrate successes rather than a bland list of what you’ve been working on.

Take this further

Get the endorsement, money and people that you need

You can sometimes have impact by working in an existing team in government. But the highest-impact opportunities might require you to find funding to support new work. People will need to be hired to do that work specifically. To achieve this, you need to understand how and why things get funding.

The best way to develop this understanding might be to talk to senior colleagues in your area. You can also:

• Learn about The Treasury and its relationship with your area and department

• Work on business cases or spending reviews - being part of a central team reviewing these is likely to be particularly useful.

Map out and prioritise your stakeholders

Almost all government work can be seen as stakeholder management in one form or another. There is always a set of people and groups whose needs you are trying to meet. Government stakeholder landscapes are often complex. You will likely have a range of political, Civil Service, industrial or third sector stakeholders on top of your line management chain. It’s really valuable to have a clear picture of who these individuals and groups are. As with everything, it’s also important to prioritise. You might not be able to keep all your stakeholders happy and some will matter vastly more than others. We recommend explicitly mapping out your stakeholders and how they relate to each other. Here is a guide to doing this. We’d also recommend the pig model for stakeholder mapping described in this section of the Systems Thinking Toolkit.

Be strategic about how you persuade others

“Persuasion” can sometimes seem manipulative or coercive. Sometimes it is… but often it’s really about helping your audience see the world through your eyes. You’re helping them understand what is at stake and how they can effect change. Cialdini’s Six Principles of Persuasion can help you improve your persuasive skills.

Story from a civil servant

Six months into the Civil Service I failed my probation and was given a 3 month extension. My manager told me that I needed to sell myself more to the senior team members. So I spent the next 3 months doing much more to promote my competence to senior colleagues. During my probation discussion, I was told I was doing much better!

Build up your team

Surround yourself with great, mission-aligned people

As we said above, you are unlikely to have much impact alone. If you can build a strong network of people to share ideas with, this will help you to learn and hone your own ideas. Ideally, you want people in your network who are:

• Intelligent, knowledgeable, and skilled in your area

• Careful systems thinkers

• Motivated by impact

• Have different ideas to you and other people in your network

• Open to new ways of working

At junior levels, you can do this by trying to find roles in good teams. You can get a sense of how good a team is by looking for past team members who’ve worked with your prospective manager. Ask them what working in that team was like to get an impression of whether it’s a place you want to be.

As you get more senior, you will be involved in more hiring and performance management processes. This means that you will have more influence over who your colleagues are. Devote a lot of time to managing your team well - the more senior you are the more of your potential impact is about how well you’re leading and empowering your team to have impact. Most departments offer a lot of management training. Take advantage of this!

A first step we recommend:

Learn how to hire well. Get involved in the hiring processes in your unit. Bear in mind that it is almost always better not to hire than to hire a bad team member.

Take this further

Become a great manager

Here are some particularly good resources:

• Book: Managing to change the world

• Book: Handbook of Principles of Organisational Behaviour

• Guide: The Starter Manager Guide

Story from a civil servant

I thought my unit’s work was really important. And I generally knew how important getting good people was for a team’s effectiveness. So when my division started a bulk recruitment for several new policy roles, I offered to take responsibility for the process. I then prioritised ensuring that we hired smart, conscientious people. I made sure the roles were advertised really widely, and I used my personal networks to encourage people that seemed high potential to apply. I put a lot of effort into the selection process to make sure that we got the best candidates. Several of the people we hired were as a direct result of my networking, and they are now some of the most valued team members in my division. They wouldn’t have been here if I hadn’t prioritised finding good people.

Counteract common flaws of the Civil Service

Understand where things could be better

A senior civil servant that we talked to said that some of their most important achievements involved preventing disasters, rather than delivering amazing projects or policies. If you want to improve the system, it’s important to understand why the government sometimes gets things very wrong.

This might be a good way to have a counterfactual impact and do better than other people who might have had your job. One way to do this is to familiarise yourself with common criticisms of the Civil Service.

Examples of common criticism are:

• Lack of diversity

• Excessive turnover and poor career incentives

• Lack of expertise and reliance on generalists

• Lack of mechanisms to make use of experts

• Poor general management skills

• Risk aversion

• Limited flexibility in hiring practices, low pay, and bad performance management

• Disconnection from reality

• Poor management and use of data

• Poor information management

• Short term thinking

In The Blunders of Our Governments, the authors highlight some key causes of policy failure:

• The disconnect between policymakers and the people who the policies affect

• Groupthink and conflict avoidance

• The unquestioned belief that some kinds of policy always work

• A disconnect between policy-making and implementation

• Panicked reactions to external events

• Lack of testing and review

Of course, you should also understand how the government is trying to fix issues like these.

In the sections below, we refer back to some of these common flaws and suggest some specific ways you can counter them. Your area of government may or may not suffer from each of these flaws, and we expect that some of these issues will have a much greater negative impact than others. As always, it will be important to prioritise the things that seem like the most important issues in your area.

Speak truth to power

Another common flaw in government is that civil servants are hesitant to speak truth to power. It can be difficult to deliver challenging messages to senior leaders and ministers. There are not strong incentives for civil servants to do this, and some seem to do it much better than others. The easy road is to keep your head down and not rock the boat, but if you want to have the greatest possible impact, you will likely need to explicitly correct the misunderstandings of decision makers. Getting good at challenging the opinions of ministers and seniors without creating tension and without them disengaging might be one of the most important skills to develop. Developing a reputation for being open, honest and direct will also likely pay off in the long run.

A first step we recommend:

Talk to a colleague about how these issues play out in your area.

Understand your policy areas REALLY well

Develop deep expertise

The Civil Service has historically focussed on building generalist skills and knowledge, so developing deep expertise is often not incentivised. But to have a big social impact, you need to have a clear picture of the system. You will need to understand your policy area and know what levers you can pull.

Additionally, one of the most common concerns about government and the Civil Service is that it is disconnected from the realities of the world. In order to make good policy, we as civil servants need to actually go out, away from our desks, and see and understand the people and systems that our policies are affecting.

If you want to make good policy and deliver effectively, you need to understand the specifics of the system you’re working in.

It helps to know about :

• the main problems, as well as proposals for solving those problems

• the different points of view, ideologies, and arguments. If people disagree, try to understand why and learn the most convincing arguments for either side (see steelmanning)

• the main stakeholders, policymakers, and thinkers in the area

• the empirical facts

It’s also important to develop a deep understanding of the issues that are most relevant to impact. For example, which problems are bigger, and how much bigger are they than the others? What are the risks and downsides of various options that people might be ignoring? Are any potential solutions or problems being neglected?

This is a challenging task, and you won't be able to reach this level of mastery for every job you go into. But you should attempt to get as deep as possible; and if you do end up specialising in a single area, you will have to go this deep.

Practically speaking - developing an understanding might include learning from people, learning from written resources and learning by creating.

Learning from people

The easiest way to learn about an area is to talk to people who know about it. For example:

• Get to know other people in the area and have regular conversations with them.

• Phone an expert. Civil servants have an extraordinary power to call on some of the world's best experts. Top academics across all fields are willing to drop everything to advise the government in policy design. If you are trying to learn about a topic, you can set up a call with an expert; they will be keen to tell you about the area and what they think the government should do.

• Look at the real world context of your area. Talk to people involved in that context. Shadow people in their workplaces. For example, if you work in education policy, you might spend time in a school or talking to teachers and students about their experiences.

• Talk to the person who did the job before you. Your predecessor at the job might still be in government and happy to chat. Ask them what they wish they’d done differently, what single thing they would want to change, what has the biggest impact in this area, and what advice they have. It’s useful to do this when you start a job, but it’s even more useful to do it 6 months in when you have a decent understanding of the role.

• Go to conferences.

• Actively try to find people working in your area who have very different perspectives to you.

Learning from written resources

It's helpful to read a variety of types of work. For example:

• Your department’s intranet: knowledge and information management in government is hard, so if you want to get a sense of the history of your area, you might need to search your intranet and shared drives for things that have been tried before by long-gone colleagues

• Policy papers

• Academic papers

• First-hand accounts, journalistic accounts, and ethnographies

• Lectures, podcasts, and interviews

• Surveys of experts

Learning by creating

One of the best ways to remember ideas you’ve learned, and build better understanding, is to create new things with the information you’ve learned. You will be doing this a lot on the job, in emails, slide packs and submissions. But for many areas of knowledge, this kind of creation won’t be required. So you might have to go out of your way to synthesise your ideas. You might do this by:

• keeping a document or notebook where you regularly make note of important theories, problems, quotes, facts and data, ideas, etc.

• setting aside a regular time each week to think about your area, synthesise what you've learned recently, and come up with new ideas

• “learning by writing”

• finding datasets relevant to the area.

Story from a civil servant

I started a new job in regulatory policy and really wanted to learn the topic well. The best thing I did was to get onto a site. I set up an opportunity to shadow a regulator on an inspection. This was a chance to meet the regulators and workers and senior executives in the regulated industry. This was not part of the planned training and no-one in the team had done this before, but I set something up. It was incredibly useful. I learnt more in those 3 days than at any other point in the Civil Service. I also went on to set this up for my colleagues as well. To keep learning after that, I started (in my free time outside of work) writing a research paper. The paper was not directly about my work - instead, I was trying to apply the lessons I had learned in my job to a new emerging area of regulation that I had not worked in, but was interested in. As well as helping sharpen my knowledge, this also helped me move to a job in that other policy area. I feel like I built up some real expertise incredibly quickly, and years later I am finding that I have policy makers reaching out to me to ask me for advice on good regulatory policy.

Identify and take opportunities for impact

Say no to less important work

We expect some parts of your work to be vastly more important than others. To have the most impact, you need to focus on the most impactful aspects of your job. This means that it’s extremely important to develop the habit of saying no to the less important things. We go into more detail about how to prioritise in the section on prioritisation later in this guide. We talk to a lot of ambitious people who are working to build an impactful career and have difficulty saying no to work.

Most central government jobs are complex. It’s difficult for managers to ensure that a given person or team's workload is appropriate. Sometimes the only signal that a person has too much work is that they appear to be struggling.

Some jobs may make setting these boundaries difficult. Some managers might not trust you to use your time well, and will push you to deliver too much. Consider leaving a team that does this to you. It is not okay and will also severely limit your ability to have an impact.

Take this further

Analyse your job

Develop a really clear understanding of what you are doing and why. Write down the types of tasks that you do and think about how important they are for achieving your goals and impact. The weekly reviews and feedback described above can help with this. See the prioritisation section in this guide for ideas about how to quantify your work’s impact.

Story from a civil servant

Richard worked in a US federal agency which regulates food additives. He produced a cost-benefit analysis of a possible ban of trans-fats. He noticed that this one piece of legislation was vastly more important than any of his other work: his analysis suggested that because of trans-fats’ negative health effects, thousands of people were dying each year. Responding to this, he prioritised his work on this piece of regulation over other work tasks. In order to make sure that the legislation went through as quickly as possible, he also mapped out the legislative process. This allowed him to figure out when he was likely to be on the critical path for the legislation becoming law, and speed up the time it took to get through to the next stages. He believed that his work sped up the process significantly, and that even if he had only caused the legislation to become active a week earlier, he would have saved 50 lives (see his story here).

Develop and improve systems

Understand, engage, prioritise…

Armed with an understanding of how things function and the capacity to make changes, you can work to improve the system around you. We’ve framed this as “developing and improving systems” to make it clear that impact probably doesn’t look like making a few great decisions in a vacuum. Impact comes from shaping the space within your reach into something that is more aware, flexible, and compassionate.

A key point here is, again, the importance of prioritisation. Impact on the government is likely very uneven. Some tasks, projects, and work-days will be vastly more impactful than others. You will need to have the systems in place to spot these unusual opportunities.

Teams in government fail when they don’t understand the system they are working with, when they don’t consider very many possible approaches (due to groupthink, inertia or panic), and when they fail to prioritise between these options well (e.g., by testing). Below are some ideas about how to address these issues in your unit.

Help your team understand the system better

The Civil Service has many sources of knowledge that can help improve your team’s understanding of the system. Here are some examples of things you could do:

Improve your team’s engagement with the experts and academics

Government email addresses are a super-power that civil servants underuse. You can often just email an academic in your area and they’ll be very keen to talk about their research in relation to your government work. The Open Innovation team might be able to help you with this.

Find new data sources

The government has a huge wealth of data, but it is often siloed in another team or department. Finding new resources can be difficult, and you might need to rely on your network. An easy first step might be to post something on the cross-government data science Slack or search the research and statistics feed. Often open data can be brought to bear on important questions - talk to your department's analysts about this. If you find an academic publication that relates to your work, the authors might be happy to share their datasets with you.

Talk to people that the policy will affect.

See Policy Labs work for some ideas of how to do this. Also, consider how your work might affect individuals that you can’t easily talk to: for example, people in other countries, people in the future, or animals.

Forecast what will happen in your area.

Forecasting is a powerful way to build a better picture of future risks and opportunities. One way to practise forecasting is to sign up to Cosmic Bazaar (you’ll need to ask around your department to get access to this). You could also read about Superforecasting, and try forecasting on Metaculus or Good Judgement Open.

Use futures analysis and horizon scanning.

These tools help you to understand the long-term future in your area. The most important impacts of your decisions might happen many years in the future. The Futures team in the Government Office for Science might be able to help you with this. You can also read more broadly about what the future might look like.

Build a good theory of change

Theories of change are common in the Civil Service, but they vary in depth and quality. There are lots of resources on building good theories of change (e.g. here). Ideally, you want to develop a clear picture of the causal relationship between your actions and the impact you want to have. Drawing up a theory of change will also allow you to identify the assumptions about cause and effect which you are most uncertain about. You can then take steps to check these assumptions, improve on your theory of change, and reprioritise your work towards more impactful actions.

Help your team prioritise better

How is work prioritised in your area? Who decides what does and doesn’t get done? If you want to prioritise better, the first step is to understand the current process. You can then think about how that process can be improved.

We believe that the quantification of difficult-to-quantify costs and benefits might be key here. If you’re an economist, or have access to the time and resources of economists, the Green Book offers lots of technical methods to quantify costs and benefits. But these tools can be applied to more of our work, not just formal economic models and business cases. You also don’t need a degree in economics to do cost-benefit analysis. Government often fails to sufficiently quantify the costs and benefits or risks of projects or policy options. A common example we’ve seen in government is risk registers that only contain red, amber, green (RAG) ratings of risks. Quantifying the severity and probability of these risks would allow your team to better prioritise which risks should be focussed on. We think anyone can get to grips with these tools, but if you are not an analyst, ask how you can best make use of the analytical professions to add rigour to your analysis.

Prioritisation tools that we think are particularly useful include:

Scale, solvability, and counterfactuals (The ITN framework)

This framework helps you estimate the relative value of working on a particular policy or project. You do this by analysing the scale, solvability and counterfactual of the work.

Scale (sometimes called ‘importance’) - how many individuals are affected and by how much? (eg: people who may be impacted, savings which could be made).

Solvability (sometimes called ‘tractability’) - how easy is success? What is the probability of failure? What are the barriers? How long will it take and how equipped are you to do something about it?

Counterfactual (or the related idea of ‘neglectedness’) - what happens if you don’t do this? Who else is working in this space? How neglected is this issue?

You can combine estimates of these to calculate how much impact each option that you are considering is expected to create.

Fermi estimates

A Fermi estimate is a rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate. Ideally, when you are estimating costs, benefits and risks, you’ll be able to find good data sources that will allow you to produce statistics you can be confident in. In practice though, this standard of evidence often isn’t possible. Data might not exist, or it might be too low quality, or you might not have time or resources to analyse it. Sometimes you need to come up with an estimate quickly based on very little hard data. Fermi estimates are invaluable for this. They provide a framework for estimating any figure, often adding much more value than you might intuitively expect (see our example in the story from a civil servant below).

Weighted factor models

Let’s say you have a list of complicated options that you can’t decide between. Consider using a weighted factor model (also known as a decision matrix).

To build a weighted factor model, you need to list all your options and all the important factors related to your decision. Each factor is then weighted by importance and each option is scored against each important factor. By doing this in a spreadsheet, you can quickly calculate which option comes out on top. You’ll also be able to identify key uncertainties and decide whether you need to investigate them more before making a final decision. See this article for several examples of this.

Quantification is important, but beware that developing lots of metrics can make you more vulnerable to Goodhart’s law. This happens when people aim to do well according to a certain metric, but in a way which might not mean actually having a positive impact. Another risk of quantification is that numbers can give an illusion of rigour. Remember that all data is wrong, but some is useful.

Take this further

Build systems that have self-improvement baked in

Good systems are not just designed by experts in an ivory tower. Good systems have iteration and learning baked in. Learn from the startup space. Effective teams often look like startups, even in big bureaucracies. Some examples include the behavioural insights team and the Open Innovation Team.

The key to successful startups is their ability to understand which of the things they are doing are working and to pivot towards something else when they are not working. Help your team do this by:

• following a pattern of build - measure - learn. You can schedule specific times in the calendar when you will decide whether to continue with the current approach or try something else.

• following the 4 disciplines of execution

• ensuring that plans are robustly challenged in a safe space. Tools to do this include:

  • Murphyjitsu or pre-mortems: imagine a future where your project has failed and work back from there: how can you prevent this happening?

  • Red-teaming: create a group of people to provide critical feedback on the proposed decision.

Story from a civil servant

We talked to a senior analyst in the Department for Transport who had to decide which of two projects their team should work on. It was not obvious which one was more important, and the two policy teams asking for analytical help seemed equally in need of support. Their team was unsure which of their project options was more impactful, and they had very little data to work with initially. So they decided to apply the ITN framework and use Fermi estimates to prioritise between them. They listed all the factors that might affect each project's impact. These included the total amount of money that could be saved, alongside the probability of success and what would be likely to happen otherwise. Using a combination of intuition and statistics, they produced an estimate of each of these factors. These estimates were then be combined to produce a final estimate of each project’s value. This work showed that one of the projects could deliver 100 times more value to the government. No-one asked this civil servant to do this. They could have worked on the project that was easier, more interesting, or more prestigious. But by doing the thinking and making it quantitative, they were able to identify and work on the vastly more impactful project.

Closing remarks

You’ll never be perfect - but you can still do a lot!

You are not going to be able to follow all of this advice, and you shouldn’t want to. You will never understand the government, or the world, completely. You will never feel like you are completely competent and producing an ideal version of your work. You will always be imperfect; you’ll always have to work in an imperfect system with imperfect colleagues. But this doesn’t prevent you from making a real difference to the lives of others. Regardless of where you are, or where you end up, you can have a huge social impact in government and beyond.

Recognise the impact you have

We suggested above that to understand your policy area really well, you should consider going out and meeting the people affected by your policy. This is useful for making good decisions; but it will also help you internalise the fact that the decisions we make in our government offices have very big real-world consequences. Your job in government is changing the way the world works. Take some time out to notice this, to meet the people affected, and to recognise the impact that you are having.

Go out and start doing things

This article is information-heavy and has lots of suggestions and links to other content. You don’t need to know it all to start doing something.

A first step we recommend:

Choose one suggested action from this article - go try it now! Bookmark this page – spend a month or two seeing if you have had a greater impact after following that suggestion. You can come back to this page later and try something else. Sign up to our mailing list to get updates of new articles, events, and jobs that will help you have impact in government. And if you found this advice helpful, let us know.

Key further reading

• 80,000 hours guide to success in any job

• How to be a civil servant

Similarly - making use of hard data on the jobs landscape could be invaluable. We’ve recently been looking at data from Civil Service jobs. Our goal was to figure out what career questions we could use it to answer. Here is some of what we found.

This data is all from April 2020 to March 2022.

A lot of Civil Service jobs are only advertised internally. Especially policy jobs and Grade 6 jobs.

We think everyone should consider spending time outside government, even if you intend to be in the Civil Service long-term. Non-government roles will help you build different strengths and gain valuable perspective. If you are considering leaving the government and then returning, be aware that, depending on your grade ambitions, and role, there may be fewer jobs advertised to you.

Proportion of adverts only advertised to existing civil servants by grade and role type.

Departments vary a lot in whether policy jobs are advertised internally. It might be near-impossible to get into foreign policy jobs from outside the government.

The above pattern varies a lot by department. Some departments do a lot of external hiring and others not so much.

For example - maybe you want to work on international policy and are considering working for an NGO before coming back to government. Be aware that it’s going to be very hard to find an FCDO job from outside the government. You will likely need to find a job in another department first. More senior Treasury jobs are also going to be difficult to get into from outside government.

Proportion of policy role adverts that were only advertised to existing civil servants by grade and department.

If you want to apply for more senior jobs, work on leadership and seeing the big picture

More senior roles are much more likely to ask for leadership and seeing the big picture behaviours. This isn't very surprising, but it might imply that the more stretching junior roles are those that mention these more SCS-associated behaviours. The leadership behaviour is the clearest example here, with 94% of policy/analysis SCS roles asking for it.

Proportion of roles at each grade that ask for each behaviour (policy and analytical roles only)

You should explore this data too

So that we can extract more insights from this data, we have added the jobs data to Kaggle.

If you don’t have the ability to analyse this data we recommend talking to analysts in your unit about making use of this data.

All data was taken from the Civil Service jobs website, where it is published under an Open government licence. This practically means there are few restrictions on how this data can be used, other than attributing it to the data source (the Civil Service Jobs website).

If you want to talk to us about this analysis then get in contact - contact@impactfulgovcareers.org. Or if you want to discuss what implications this might have for your career - then sign up for free coaching with us!

Civil Service Jobs (CSJ) is the main way civil servants find new jobs. And while at IGC, we occasionally hear complaints about the website itself, it’s actually pretty great compared to many alternatives. And it just got a load better, especially if you care about working in particular policy areas.

As of this month, the CSJ website has a new feature that allows you to search jobs by job title, skill or keyword. So if, for example, you want to work in a particular policy area, you can now set up an alert that will let you know whenever there is a new job in that area. This new feature has inspired me to highlight a few other things that civil servants can do to ensure that they make best use of the CSJ website.

Think carefully about how you set up your job alerts

CSJ allows you to set up daily or weekly alerts for new jobs, based on filters you select. Setting up good job alert filters is a common piece of advice that we give during coaching. Key mistakes include:

• Not setting up alerts at all - Civil Service jobs are usually only advertised for 2 weeks, and the application can take a while, especially if you get feedback on your application (strongly recommended). So need to know about new jobs as soon as possible.

• Setting your filter too wide or too narrow - e.g. only setting your search to a few departments that you are really interested in. There are over 100 organisations on the website, are you sure that none of them have jobs that you’d be interested in applying for? Similarly, you want your alert to give you a list of jobs that you can quickly browse. Hundreds of jobs are added every day, so you do need to be selective.

• Only setting up an alert when you're doing an active job search - keeping an eye on the job market can help you decide which skills to focus on in your current role. If you are thinking of going for promotion any time soon, you should include jobs from the grade you're hoping to move to long before you start to actively apply.

• Not validating that your account belongs to a civil servant - our analysis of the CSJ jobs data has shown that almost half of jobs are only advertised to existing civil servants (and G6 and G7 jobs are particularly likely to only be advertised internally). Get access to these jobs by validating that you are a current civil servant on the “Account Details” page.

Keep a record of jobs that interest you, even if you don’t apply to them

An important part of planning your next career step is to develop a clear picture of the job market. One of the best ways to do this is to capture hard data on the jobs that you are interested in. How often do they come up? What skills, experience and behaviours are they asking for? What are the skill gaps you need to fill to maximise your chance when applying for them? We suggest you create a spreadsheet or document to record any interesting jobs that come up. Keep an active job alert and any time you see a job that you might want to apply for, put it into that document/sheet (even if you’re not actively looking to switch jobs). This can only take a few minutes a week and could vastly improve your understanding of your options.

Use the new keyword feature to find jobs in areas that matter to you

Now that CSJ allows you to search for jobs by keywords, you should experiment. Brainstorm words that could be relevant and set up an alert for each one. For example, if you want to find a job that allows you to help address climate change, you might want to search for “climate”, “net zero”, and “carbon”. Set up a search for each one of these (including your location, grade and profession filters). It doesn’t matter if these search results overlap, your job alert will only contain each job once. You might also want to set up skill based alerts (e.g. data scientist).

Remember to look elsewhere

Expressions of Interest (EOIs) are another common way civil servants move jobs. If you haven't already, find the place on your department's intranet where these are advertised, bookmark that page, and set a reminder to check it regularly.

The UK Civil Service offers huge opportunities for impact, but so do many other places. I don’t believe any civil servant should stop considering non-Civil Service roles, at least a little. If you are confident that the Civil Service is for you, then it makes sense to focus your search efforts there, but you can still give some time to look at other places. For example, here is a great list of social impact job boards to take a look at.

Take action now!

1. Create an action in your to do list to experiment with setting up (better) job alerts! And once you’ve done that - set a time in a month or two to review whether you’ve got your filters right and correct if needed!

2. Create an action to make a spreadsheet or document to keep a record of the jobs that you like the look of.

3. Create an action to make a list of other places to look for jobs that you might be interested in (including your department’s EOI page)

And if any of this advice helps you land your next job, please let us know!

Side note: the IGC jobs app is now retired

At IGC, we had noticed the need for the keyword feature when searching for Civil Service jobs. This was why we built our jobs app; to help you search jobs by policy area. Now that you can do this search via the CSJ website itself our app is much less needed. We have therefore decided to stop supporting it.

We still think there is a need for more analysis of the Civil Service Jobs data. And we want to help you make data informed career decisions. We will therefore be publishing more analysis of this data, and what it says about career decisions in the Civil Service, in the coming months. (sign up to our mailing list to be informed when this is published)

Summary

When it comes to having a social impact in government, many of us want to see the impact that we are having. We want to believe and feel like we are helping others. Many of us also want to find the best opportunities for impact in government.

In our discussions with civil servants across government we’ve come across some problems with finding the above:

• Government work is often far removed from beneficiaries

• High impact options are often quite uncertain

• Paradoxically, social impact is likely negatively correlated with actually having a connection to beneficiaries of the work. The highest impact opportunities are the most removed from the people the work impacts.

In response to this paradox - we suggest several possible solutions:

• Develop a theory of change that you believe in

• “See the front” - get closer to the beneficiaries

• Try and find roles that balance impact and connection

• Look for connection outside of work

This article covers these ideas in more detail.

It’s hard to feel connected to the impact you’re having in government

The first job I got in the UK Civil Service was as a statistician in the Department for Education (DfE). I thought that this work seemed important. Education gives people the skills and knowledge they need to thrive. Providing every child with an education seemed to me to be one of the most valuable things that the government does. I was convinced by the power of good education policy to improve the lives of everyone in the country.

Working in central government, is where the most impactful policies are designed and implemented. This seemed to be the perfect place to help contribute. I could have gone and worked directly at a local level, maybe in a school, but the opportunity to improve the lives of millions, in central government, seemed much better.

When I started in DfE, my work largely consisted of analysing data on school spending to inform policy decisions. My days were filled with looking through spreadsheets of data, sending emails back and forth and sitting in meetings with policy teams. This made some sense and it felt like I was helping achieve something. But something didn’t feel quite right.

I felt like I was helping my colleagues, and that felt good. I felt like I was making use of my technical skills as part of an effective team, and that felt good. But was I really helping the people I had set out to? Was I actually improving the lives of young people across the country?

At Impactful Government Careers, we talk to a lot of people in government who want to make a difference. People, who like us, really want to feel like their work is improving the lives of others.

And we believe that one of the most promising places to make a difference is in the centre of government. Central government policy affects everyone in the UK as well as playing an important role internationally. One of the key questions when assessing the impact of any role is “what is the scale of this work?”. How many people does the work affect and by how much? For many roles in government, the answer to these questions is “A LOT!” Unfortunately there is a paradox here. As you move closer to the centre of government, you necessarily move further from the people the work affects. When your work affects millions, you can’t directly interact with all those people. Your impact therefore needs to be directed through a large number of intermediaries.

But the need to feel like we are making a difference is really important. The feeling of compassion is precious and powerful. That need is only satisfied when we feel connected to the people our work helps.

An IGC coachee was recently considering going to work for a homelessness charity. Their Whitehall job was leaving them feeling disconnected from any actual beneficiaries of their work. They explained that while they knew that the work was important intellectually, their heart was unsatisfied. The appeal of working directly with the people that their work helps seemed like it would meet this need much better.

It would be understandable to want to leave the government and do more direct work in this situation. But I believe that there are some strategies that could help you stay connected to beneficiaries while still working on the big, high-level policy changes that maximise your impact.

Develop a theory of change that you believe in

A theory of change connects the things that you do day-to-day, to the impact you want to see. Theories of change are common in the Civil Service, but they vary in depth and quality. There are lots of resources on building good theories of change (e.g. here). If you have a theory of change that you really believe in, you can feel more connection between your tasks, their outcomes, and the change you want to see. If you can see the full chain of cause and effect between drafting that email to a stakeholder and the whole system improving, then writing that email will feel much better. Good theories of change are also a necessary component in actually having an impact.

Good leaders will help you do this. High impact teams know why they are doing what they are doing and have a robust model for the connection between their work and impact they are looking to achieve. Your team should be testing the parts of the theory that have the greatest uncertainty and gathering evidence of their outcomes and impact.

If your team doesn’t help you to feel like your work matters or doesn’t support you in building a good theory of change for your work, consider trying to find a team that will.

“See the front” - get closer to the beneficiaries

The idea of “seeing the front” comes from an important military principle. Generals, who might spend most of their days in bunkers, working on broad battle strategy, can validate or challenge their understanding of a battle by actually spending time on the front lines. This also allows them to spend time with people their decisions affect. This helps them to empathise and improve their understanding of the troops’ experience. You can do a similar thing when working in central government. If you work on education policy, spend some time in a school. If you work on mental health delivery, talk to people with lived experience of mental illness. If this is not a typical thing to do in your unit, then try to make the case for the value in taking time out for stakeholder visits. This will both help you validate your theory of change and form an emotional connection to the impact of your work.

Find the right balance of impact and connection

As suggested above, I think that in most areas there is a trade-off between impact and direct connection. Depending on how much you value these things, some jobs will be better or worse. Some jobs might be about enacting big systemic change but also allow you to work with the people that you’re helping. Examples of this might include roles that are about directly engaging with citizens to inform central policy or jobs that are focused on improving how the Civil Service functions.

Look for connection outside of work

For some jobs or career paths, the above options may just be hard or impossible. If that’s the case, before you decide government isn’t for you, I’d suggest experimenting with other options for connecting with the people you’re helping. Volunteering, or joining other social groups in your community for example. Most government departments allow up to 5 days of volunteering leave (which seems to be heavily under-used).

What do you think?

The above strategies are ideas, but we are very uncertain as to which will help the most. We want to connect to our beneficiaries and validate our theories of change, so please let us know whether this or any of our other work has helped you.

A civil servant that we interviewed told us this story:

They were working on a complex and novel policy proposal. To ensure the proposal took account of the long-term, they wanted to understand future trends in the policy area. Fortunately there was a large community of academics that knew a lot about the area, so it would just be a case of consulting with them! When they suggested this, they were met with significant resistance from their team. The reasons weren’t very clear, but it seemed to be something to do with the risk of exposing half complete policy plans. Our civil servant persevered though, they continued to make the case for academic engagement and did eventually bring in a team of academics to discuss the trends in the area. Unfortunately it had taken several months to get to that point and the proposal was at a late stage, so the actual value this provided was limited.

The above story isn’t unique. The government is bureaucratic and risk averse. This isn’t too controversial to say. Civil servants will regularly complain that:

• Things take too long and it’s often not clear why

• Too much sign-off is needed for minor things

• They feel hemmed in by huge networks of stakeholders, even when trying to make small or obviously positive improvements to a system

How can you manage to get important work done in a bureaucratic system and how can you ensure you don’t get frustrated and burnt out? The rest of this post offers some solutions.

The are four main reactions to finding yourself part of a malfunctioning system:

• Understand it

• Accept it

• Fight it

• Flee from it

Understand the bureaucracy

There is always a reason that the system is the way that it is. Sometimes that reason is good, sometimes not. Often seemingly convoluted processes are built up without anyone having any holistic oversight. Instead they come from lots of actors trying to get the system to meet their complex or specific needs.

Empathise with the people in the system. Be curious. Ask everyone why things are the way they are. Ask people what they care about and what their managers care about.

Validate that you are not crazy for thinking the system is not working correctly. Big bureaucracies are ships built at sea. Many processes aren’t explicitly designed and those that are often aren’t designed with a full understanding of the problem.

Understanding is key to both acceptance and successfully working to fix the system. And if you start in a new area and it looks like a part of the way things work is broken, maybe it is, but maybe things are that way for a reason. (See: Chesterton’s fence).

Accept the bureaucracy

This is how this system is. It might be better in the future, but this is how it is now. We often waste energy wishing things were otherwise. We imagine a better system and become frustrated with the inadequacies of the one we are in. When something we care about progresses slower than we expected, that is frustrating. But it’s also an opportunity to update your expectations. Learn how to connect with how things really are and avoid the painful sense of dissatisfaction.

Fight the bureaucracy

Does that team really need to be part of this process? Is there a reason that email needs to go through your entire management chain? Is there really any risk here? If not, try making this point. Find ways to meet the needs of the people who are insisting on the bureaucracy being there. Find the people who are likely to veto your work and find a way to avoid their veto. Join up with other teams that are fighting the same fight. Talk to us about this!

Make sure you prioritise. It’s understandably frustrating that a HR process slowed you down unnecessarily, but is improving it the best use of your time in government? (it might well be, but there will be lots of other things that you can improve)

Most people in the world can only sit at the receiving end of government bureaucracy. You have an opportunity, by being in government, to affect real change here. Connect with that fact if you find it motivating.

Flee the bureaucracy Don’t risk burning out trying to get things done in a system that isn’t working with you. Some parts of government are less bureaucratic. Many leaders and managers will really empower you to make things happen. If you don’t feel like you can do important things in your unit, think about leaving. You might also think about leaving government.

If you want to talk to us about how you can deal with bureaucracy in your area - sign up for IGC coaching.

Further reading

• Smash the bureaucracy

• Bureaucracy and democracy: attack and protection of the state in contexts of democratic backsliding

• Empowerment and Stakeholder Management

“Just follow your passion!”

This is perhaps the most frequently given career advice of our time. Find something you love to do, and go do it.

After all, people who are successful in their careers are often passionate about their day job. It makes sense, right?

Wrong. ‘Follow your passion”, for most of us, is pretty unhelpful career advice:

• Some of us have too many passions at the start of our careers and don’t know which one to prioritise. Equally, some of us need to try many different options before finding a passion for anything. Telling people to follow a single passion that they may not yet have can be disheartening, and lead to feelings of inadequacy.

• It is true that many successful people are passionate about what they do. But often this passion derives from the mastery and success they attain in a given field, rather than coming earlier.

• Finally, the “follow your passion” mantra can often steer us towards ‘outputs’ – the things we most enjoy consuming. (“I love listening to Radio 4, so I think I would enjoy being a broadcast interviewer.”) But this logic is flawed. The things we enjoy consuming aren’t necessarily the things we enjoy doing as our job. And by focusing on outputs, we write off whole areas of the economy as sources of good work because they don’t relate directly to these outputs.

So instead of focusing on outputs, it is much better to focus on inputs – what, for you, are the components of good work?

When you start asking this question, you begin to see that good work exists in a far broader range of jobs than you might have first realised.

We think there are seven key components to good work:

1. A job you can become good at

Being good at your job helps you enjoy it more. It also builds career capital, which gives you influence and opens up interesting options later in life.

Besides, the most successful people in a field account for a disproportionately large fraction of the impact, and having an impact is an important component of good work.

If you’re unsure how to match your strengths to a civil service role, our careers coaching can help you think about what your skillset is and identify impactful career paths across Government. Or take a look at our job search tool to see what opportunities are out there.

2. Flow

Work is enjoyable and engaging if it enables you to enter a state of flow – the mental state of feeling completely immersed in a feeling of energised focus and enjoyment.

Work that induces this desirable state has four defining characteristics:

• Clear tasks;

• Freedom to decide how to perform each task;

• Quick feedback; and

• High variety of work.

3. Helping others

Helping others gives your work a sense of purpose.

To maximise your impact, focus on the most urgent social problems, rather than those you stumble into – those that are big in scale, neglected and solvable.

Create a mission around one of these problems, where your skills intersect with the needs of the world.

4. Psychological safety

If you work as part of a team, this team’s culture will be vitally important to your levels of job satisfaction.

Above all else, any team you work in should foster a psychologically safe environment – one in which you can express your ideas and feelings without becoming insecure or embarrassed.

5. Fit with personal life

No matter how enjoyable your work is, you will eventually resent it if it does not fit the lifestyle you want to create for yourself.

Find work that will provide you with significant autonomy over your time and location, once you have built up sufficient career capital.

6. Future proof

It’s important to find work that will, as far as possible, equip you with the skills that are likely to remain valuable in the years and decades to come.

Research tells us that the jobs that are least likely to become automated in the coming years are those requiring high levels of problem solving, creativity and social intelligence.

7. No major downsides

Good work also means avoiding major downsides. Major downsides will differ for everyone, but common ones are unfair pay, discrimination, job insecurity, long hours, a long commute or a bad boss.

Want to explore what the Civil Service has to offer? The recently developed Civil Service careers website gives potential applicants valuable insights into different roles, teams and departments.

Further reading

To Find Work You Love, Don’t Follow Your Passion, 80,000 Hours

What Makes for a Dream Job, 80,000 Hours

The Input / Output Confusion, The Book of Life

The Puzzle of Motivation, Dan Pink

The Five Keys to a Successful Google Team, Google re:Work

A Guide to Using your Career to Help Solve the World’s Most Pressing Problems, 80,000 Hours

(This post was originally published on the HIPE website in 2019)

Our careers present us with one of the biggest challenges we face – to find an external expression for our deepest interests and talents, in a form that will be useful to others.

This is not always easy to accomplish:

• Firstly, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of career paths on offer.

• Secondly, it’s very difficult for most of us to locate our true interests. The generic advice to ‘follow your passion’ isn’t all that helpful when you have no idea what you’re passionate about!

• And finally, it’s hard to know what a useful job looks like, particularly at the beginning of your career. A job may be hugely beneficial to the world, but we don’t feel the impact if an organisation is too large.

So what steps can we take to make sure we rise to this challenge and have a fulfilling, high impact career?

1. At the beginning, experiment – and say ‘yes’ to every opportunity

Despite what we might like to think, we are all pretty bad predictors of what makes us happy.

So at the beginning of your career, experiment. Say yes to every opportunity, and live where opportunities can easily find you. The Civil Service Fast Stream is one way to experiment in a variety of roles in departments across government. It will help you better understand both the work you enjoy and what you can become good at.

As you experiment, pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you.

And since most jobs have bad beginnings, it’s just as important to assess what the work looks like for people a few years ahead of you.

The earlier you learn these lessons, the better. As one modern day writer on careers puts it, “it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

2. Define what good work means to you

Once you’ve done enough experimenting, start to define very specifically what you want from your working life.

Be highly selective – what components are non-negotiable for you?

Once you have defined what good work means to you, you’ll have a much better chance of finding it.

Impactful Government Careers offers one-to-one career coaching sessions for civil servants to help you decide where to focus your career and what impact means to you.

3. Early on, focus on career capital over impact

It’s hard to help others without being good at your job. Besides, being good at your job is really important for a happy and fulfilling career.

So before you worry too much about having a big impact, build your career capital – the skills, networks and experience you will need to succeed.

Examples of transferable, future-proof career capital include contacts, speaking, writing, psychology, design, conversation, a second language, persuasion, programming and focus. Civil Service Learning offers lots of learning and development opportunities, helping equip you with the right skills to move your career forward.

Focus on the learning process, not the result. Pick projects which, even if they fail to achieve your desired result, will equip you with skills and networks that will benefit you in the future.

You don’t need to obtain mastery in any one field. A rare combination of skill sets and experiences is probably more useful in the long run, and often easier to achieve.

Once you feel the learning curve slowing in any particular job, move on. Boredom is failure!

4. Later on, focus on impact over career capital

Later in your career, you will hopefully have the career capital required to do a great deal of good in the world.

You can now use this hard-earned career capital to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

5. Towards the end of your career, only

say ‘yes’ to the very best opportunities

By this point in your career, you can afford to be much more selective than when you were experimenting. If an opportunity doesn’t really excite you, and doesn’t provide massive scope for impact, you should feel free to say ‘no’ to it.

Apply the ‘hell yes or no!’ test. Either an opportunity should make you think ‘hell yes!’, or you say ‘no’.

When you say ‘no’ to most things you leave room in your career, and in your life, to really throw yourself completely into that rare thing that really excites you.

Further reading

On Career Crises, Alain de Botton

Commencement speech at the University of the Arts, 2012, Neil Gaiman

Ways to succeed at work (if you’re a woman), Jo Wimble-Groves

How to pick a career that actually fits you, Tim Urban

Effective Altruism, TedX Talk from Beth Barnes

Summary of So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport

The Top Five Reasons to Be a Jack of All Trades, Tim Ferriss

(This post was originally published on the HIPE website in 2019)

1. Every civil servant has the potential to change the country for the better by doing practical steps to maximise their career impact.

2. Early in your career, explore different options by talking to people and trying things inside and outside of work hours and then use your skills, experience and networks to progress into your dream job.

3. Maximise your effectiveness in any role in the Government by looking for opportunities to have impact, speaking up when you think right and putting in more time when it matters.

In Government it’s often easy to think that the real power lies elsewhere. But every civil servant has huge potential to change the country – and the world – for the better.

In part 1, we summarised the key components of a dream job – something you are good at and that helps others with no major downsides. We suggested how to find it – by exploring to find the best options, investing in your career capital, focusing on the most pressing social problems, making decisions based on feedback and working within a community.

In Part 2, we suggest how you can apply this approach to your career in Government to help you have the biggest social impact you can. Each one of us can help save lives, create jobs, and ensure a fairer, safer and more prosperous country for us all. Impactful Government Career's mission is to help you fulfil your potential as a civil servant, and do the most good you can with your career – so read on!

Stage 1 EXPLORE

In general, it’s hard to work out what you’re going to be good at ahead of the time, even through self-reflection. Exploring careers by speaking to those in the area, undertaking similar projects or shadowing on the side of what you’re doing already. You could also complete work placements if you’re early on in your career.

So how can you exploring different options once you’re in the Civil Service?

First, talk, think and learn to develop an understanding of different options with minimal time spent.

• Brainstorm: Put aside some time to write down your options. Give yourself long enough to look past the most immediate opportunities.

• Think of your past bright spots: what tasks have you enjoyed doing? Why did you enjoy doing them? Use this feedback to guide you into finding a job you enjoy.

• Talk to people working in different jobs: asking people for coffee or speaking to them at networking events helps you understand what people do day to day in different roles. Ask for introductions or identify and connect with colleagues via LinkedIn if you know what you’re interested in. If you want to broaden your knowledge, explore if there is a ‘coffee roulette’ in your department or even set one up.

• Find a mentor: mentors provide advice, support and connections to jobs you’re interested in. Some departments run mentoring schemes but these can be slow to get off the ground. Be proactive and ask someone you admire for coffee. Providing you are professional and considerate of their time, many leaders respect proactivity. If they’re overcommitted, make sure you ask for a recommendation from their team.

If you’re from an under-represented group, research targeted opportunities such as talent schemes and mentoring programmes which exist to help develop leaders who are more representative of the communities they serve.

Once you’ve narrowed down your options, try things in work hours to see if you are good at them.

• Ask for different work: share your development needs with your manager and team so they can direct work you are interested in towards you. Speak with your manager to ensure your objectives provide you with the opportunity to try work in a new area that you are interested in. You may need to be creative to ensure that this work contributes to your team’s objectives.

• Shadow different roles: with your manager’s support, ask individuals and teams you admire for the opportunity to shadow their work. Most teams can support a 1-2 day shadow at a mutually convenient time and some can offer secondments to test longer term projects. Be prepared to describe what you want from the role and take what you’ve learnt back to your own team.

Certain roles – such as working in the private office of a minister or senior civil servant – require regular cover. If you are interested in these roles or in other high-profile roles, be tactical as the occupant is more likely to provide cover to someone who works in their area who will be a safe pair of hands and get quickly up to speed.

• Corporate objectives: the Civil Service supports you spending 10% of your time working on a corporate project, often of your choosing. This means that, with the right attitude and a supportive manager, you can use half a day per week working on the single thing that you think is the most valuable use of your time. Talk to us if you are stuck for ideas, engage with and join forces with colleagues, or just get started on your idea! We would love to hear from you if this propels you to action and would be happy to support and mentor promising ventures.

• Move around jobs: until you’ve found something you’re good at, be ready to move jobs to try things that which you believe you might be good at. Certain schemes within government such as the Fast Stream and the Fast Track are designed to provide participants with experience of different roles and departments. These schemes welcome in-service as well as external applicants.

Balance getting wide experience early in your career with getting targeted experience to support your progression. The further you progress, the wider your knowledge needs to be – however for your immediate progression, a hiring manager will appoint the candidate with the strongest experience and potential the relevant area.

Alongside, try things outside work to gain the broadest and richest understanding you can:

• Volunteer: civil servants can have up to five days volunteering leave a year. This gives you the opportunity to try working in different areas and in different roles if you can make a commitment. Learn whether you enjoy strategy as a trustee for a small charity, working in institutional settings as a magistrate, working with the community as a special constable, leading a team in the reserves or managing operations as a coordinator for a homeless shelter.

• Use annual leave to pursue projects: provided your health is good and your caring responsibilities allow you to, annual leave you give you the opportunity to explore options further afield. If you have the opportunity to take extended leave, consider reaching out to organisations of interest internationally who may be interested in support from the UK and promoting their work here. Organisations such as the Churchill Foundation provide funding for you to learn from elsewhere and bring this back to the Government.

• Work outside the Civil Service: the Civil Service Workforce plan set the ambition for the civil service to have “more porous organisational borders” and committed that all roles should be advertised externally by 2020. HR policy will vary by department however many will allow you to leave and return to apply for roles at the same permanent grade you were at within a certain period. Senior leaders are likely to support you to leave and return to government within a certain period, particularly if you have done well and they want to keep you or if you are in an area of project work with reasonably high turnover. Maintaining a strong external network will provide you with opportunities to explore different sectors and develop skills and expertise you might not have been able to in government.

Stage 2 PROGRESS

Career capital puts you in a better position to secure and transition between your dream jobs – including skills, connections, credentials and your portfolio.

Have you ever played interview bingo? Try writing down six relevant and special things that you have done before going into an interview and then trying to cross all of them off during the interview. It helps us sell ourselves – as well as making interviews less scary!

There are things you can do in government to help build your career capital and fill up that interview bingo card.

• Learn in-demand skills: the Civil Service consists of around 28 professions ranging from operational delivery to policy. Each profession has developed its own competency framework to support development in the profession. There are also currently 10 more specialist functional areas ranging from digital to project delivery which provide professional services and support to departments. Specialist knowledge in functional areas is traditionally more scarce in government so developing expertise in these areas will make you a more attractive hire in future.

• Build your professional network: the Civil Service is a small place. Despite consisting of almost 400,000 people, the length of careers, the turnover between roles and the small sphere of roles people move between makes your network important. Although the vast majority of roles are advertised on Civil Service Jobs, urgent recruitment for high profile projects can be done through ‘managed moves’. You are likely to get jobs through not someone you know but someone your network knows. Develop your network through changing roles, joining cross departmental networks, at training events and conferences and through social networks such as LinkedIn and Slack.

• Learn how to work the system: Tony Blair described his earlier premiership as “sitting in a Rolls Royce and I can’t find the key” to one of his cabinet secretaries, Richard Wilson. Given the scale and complexity of the Government, a critical asset is understanding how to get things done. This could range from passing legislation to launching a communications campaign to procuring and managing the contract for a government service. No matter what the area, reaching out to someone with a reputation for effectiveness and being able to use them as a sounding board as you develop your own experience will give you examples of how to get things done.

• Develop examples of your experience: the Civil Service tends to use structured interviews where candidates are asked a consistent set of questions with clear criteria to assess the quality of responses. There are two types of structured interviews: behavioural and situational. Behavioural interviews ask candidates to describe prior achievements and match those to what is required in the current job (i.e., “Tell me about a time . . . ?”). Situational interviews present a job-related hypothetical situation (i.e., “What would you do if . . . ?”). The more experience you have, the better placed you are to answer behavioural questions. Look for opportunities to complete time limited projects and understand what the objectives and the outcomes are your work to be ready to communicate this to an interviewer.

Stage 3 HAVE IMPACT

When you have successfully navigated onto a path you are happy with, don’t forget to share your experiences and support others to do the same. Civil servants are often exceptionally modest – the most impactful ones we have spoken to often cite how ‘lucky’ they have been. Luck is part of it, but there is also commitment to being ready for when big opportunities come, being determined to push through difficult times and supporting others to navigate their own impactful career paths. Remember it is okay to feel proud of wanting to work in this way. Good luck!

(This post was originally published on the HIPE website in 2019)

1. Your dream job is something that:

   • You’re good at

   • Helps others

   • Has good work conditions

2. You can find this dream job by exploring your options, investing in what looks good to an employer and focusing on the most urgent social problems.

3. Working in the civil service could be a dream job for high performers and/or specialists who are able to tolerate bureaucracy in return for the potential to impact the most important social issues.

It’s easy to think that the real power lies elsewhere.

But everyone has huge potential to change the country – and the world – for the better. We can help save lives, increase prosperity and safeguard the planet for future generations.

You have 80,000 hours in your career. Spend ten minutes reading this career guide to find out how to secure your dream job, progress in your career and have a positive social impact working in the Civil Service.

What a dream job is (and isn’t)

Our friends at 80,000 Hours reviewed over 60 studies about what made a dream job. They found three things that had a bigger impact on life satisfaction than pay. We’ve summarised the three key factors below but you can also read their article or full evidence review.

First, you should be good at your work. When we do things we’re good at, we achieve more and feel happier as a result. We’re also in a stronger position to negotiate better working conditions.

Second, your work should help others. When we help others, we feel purpose and feel happier as a result.

Third, the conditions in which you work should make it more enjoyable, or at least not unpleasant. A dream job has more positives (engaging work and supportive colleagues) than negatives (unfair pay, a lengthy commute or unsocial hours).

Does this sound good to you?

Whether you think this is life-changing advice or just plain common sense – you’re probably thinking that the difficult part is finding a dream job rather than knowing the components. Read on!

How to find a cure for cancer, a soulmate and a dream job

Take a minute to think about the decisions you make in your life. They range from buying milk to choosing someone to spend the rest of your life with. Or to buy pineapple juice, not milk, and subscribe to a less conventional lifestyle… Now think about how often you make those decisions.

The more important the decision, the fewer times we’ll have to make it. As a result, we don’t practise making big decisions. We’re better at knowing which milk to buy than who we will make us happy in marriage.

When we don’t know the answer to big questions, we do experiments. So treat finding your dream job like an experiment. Or if you’d rather – like how we should approach dating using apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge etc.

Again our friends at 80,000 Hours have done the leg work for us. We’ve condensed their research on how to find your dream job into five stages below:

First, explore to find the work you could be really good at. Even through self-reflection, it’s hard to work out what you’re going to be good at before you’ve done it. Explore careers by speaking to people working in an area, shadowing on the side of what you’re doing already or completing work placements if you’re early on in your career.

You wouldn’t marry the first person you matched with on Tinder – explore rather than commit to early career choices.

Second, focus on the most urgent social problems to help others effectively. You can have more impact by finding a job which tackles a problem big in scale, neglected and solvable. Problems of this type in government could for example be found by looking at cross-departmental issues like social care, long term issues like bio risk and structural questions like improving policy decision-making.

We can have impact in any job – but we’re more likely to a greater impact in some over others. Similarly, we can fall in love with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as us. We may be more likely to fall for someone who shares our values and interests, and who is looking for similar things in life.

Third, invest in your career capital. Career capital puts you in a better position to secure and transition between your dream jobs in the future. Career capital includes skills, connections, credentials and your portfolio.

Traditional ways of gaining career capital in the civil service include:

• getting promoted;

• working for private office, or departments or teams with a reputation for high performance;

• gaining qualifications or experience of a valuable transferable skill such as data science or procurement.

Less traditional activities include:

• Volunteering outside of work;

• Getting experience in the private sector;

• Starting a corporate project;

• Maintaining a popular blog.

Developing career capital is like having a flawless first date outfit, good Whatsapp chat and sufficient relationship experience to overcome common pitfalls. It’s how we show we want something and are reliable enough to be a good bet.

Fourth, adapt your plan to find what makes sense for you. Create a strong feedback loop. Review your progress, using the strengths you discover you have, what career capital would be useful for your plans, and which opportunities would suit you over others. Find ways to practise and get better at career decisions. Make careful decisions, adapt your plan as you learn more and find a better career over time.

Challenge yourself to consider the real you, not an idealised version of yourself. Are you overly attached to prestige, recognition or proving yourself to that teacher who always thought you wouldn’t amount to anything? What is most important to you?

Every argument or breakup – be it yours or someone else’s – helps you understand how to be happy in a relationship. Feedback loops help us transition into better and better jobs – and develop meaningful partnerships.

Fifth, work with a community to be more successful. Communities can help us find jobs, get up to date information and become more motivated. We can also work with people with different skills sets to achieve more than we can do individually. Looking for a relationship on your own isn’t much fun. Being part of a group where you can share up to date information, wing man each other and keep us motivated is much more fun. To engage with the Impactful Government Careers community join our email list here.

Career stages

How you focus on these stages changes as your career progresses.

Towards the start of your career you will mostly be exploring: building an understanding of what you want, what your skills are, what career choices look best for you and what social issues you can have the biggest social impact by working on, based on your values.

Never stop exploring, but as you gain an understanding of your needs you can start progressing towards the jobs you know you can do well in, building up the relevant skills and other career capital.

You can make a difference at every stage but, most likely, your ability to have a social impact will rise towards the end of your career, e.g. when you are working at a senior level in a job you can do well in an area you care about.

Is the Civil Service your dream job?

If you’re reading this, you’re probably already in the Civil Service or thinking about joining.

Jobs in Government offer opportunities for huge social impact and job satisfaction – particularly if you are successful enough to secure an influential role tackling the world’s most pressing problems and you have a clear ‘edge’ that helps you have more impact in that role than others.

You are more likely to enjoy working in Government if you enjoy building career capital through knowledge and connections. And if working in a supportive environment with reasonable hours is important to you.

However, you’re likely to be frustrated by working in government if you want to see the direct impact of your work, if you struggle in conformist, bureaucratic cultures or want to work in the private sector in future.

How does that sound? Happy you ‘swiped right’ on Government? Part 2 explores how to build a socially impactful career in government.

Read more

If you want to read more on the topics above you can also read articles by 80,000 Hours on choosing an area to focus on, which jobs help people the most, finding the right career, making your career plan and joining a community.

(This post was originally published on the HIPE website in 2019)