A month in the life of a Civil Service placement student

by Isabella Hardwick

Week 1

This week, I spent a couple of days conducting the progression interviews. These are interviews where people inside the organisation are interviewing to move to a higher grade/position in the organisation. They have to demonstrate in the interview that they are already working at a higher level than their current position, and as examiners, we have to judge whether or not they will receive the promotion. It has been great to see my development throughout these sessions. I am growing in confidence in asking intuitive questions to the candidate based on their interactive (presentation) event as well as during the Line Manager sessions. Indeed, I received feedback from the other panel members on my performance during the interviews complimenting my ‘inquisitive nature’. This kind of feedback means a lot to me and I feel so proud not only for being involved in the interview process but also for being recognised for my efforts.

 I also received great feedback from my manager on the absenteeism model that I was working hard on perfecting. This is an economic model where I have taken data on how many absent days our staff have taken in two time periods and, using staff costs, determining how much the value is of this change in absenteeism. She gave compliments on my organisation and good practice throughout the model. This felt very rewarding because I spent a lot of time making sure it reflects the Excel training that the placement students had been given at the start of our roles. Both these positive feedbacks on my hard work were extremely gratifying.

Week 2

A couple of other placement students and I have been working on some interrelating projects which are being put forward as a research programme next year. My workstream is the Benefit Evidence Gaps. This workstream aims to identify where we have evidence gaps in our analysis. More specifically, when we value the benefits of a decision, we must identify what information we are missing that we need to value. To make sure that our three workstreams work effectively together, we have spent a great deal of time in meetings to communicate the best way to work together and present these ideas to the senior leadership team next week. We sent a draft of a note to be sent before the meeting to our manager to give some feedback. This proved effective in making sure our points are as concise as possible.

 I have signed up to attend a few conferences in the coming weeks based on breaking disability stereotypes in the workplace. The kick-off meeting took place on Monday, and I am looking forward to the rest. They are very well organised and have already raised my awareness of several ways people can be discriminated against through visible and hidden disabilities. I believe it is all our responsibility to make sure that we are aware of these actions, despite them sometimes being subconscious.

 As the Delivery Options Appraisal (DOA) economic coordinator, my manager has allocated me the responsibility to organise a template which will showcase all the economic benefits accrued from our work with all five DOA programmes. I completed my initial template and received feedback from my manager shortly after to improve. The feedback I received was that my presentation-building knowledge needed some development. I am grateful that I am now able to work on improving this skill.

Week 3

This was another positive week for me. I took time with my manager to go through my Carbon Calculator, which I was struggling to produce a method for. The idea of this model is to provide the user with an option for both the price year and volume of energy of their choice and to convert these into a monetary figure for the cost of the respective carbon, including low, high, and best estimates. With this help, I was able to pull the necessary variables together and complete the final model at the end of the week. This was a great exercise for my development of Excel modelling and planning skills. I am quite proud of the model I produced, and I look forward to presenting it in my economic seminar in a few months. Here, I will be presenting the tool to a relatively large audience in a seminar.

 I had a meeting-heavy week this week. It was quite intense, especially with my full-time meeting for IT Infrastructure and Future Ways of Working for the DOA. These meetings require a high level of focus, especially on IT Infrastructure where I was taking notes. I did manage to chair the Future Ways of Working meeting. The pre-prepared agenda made this a lot easier than initially expected. Chairing meetings is a great development opportunity for me and my confidence and so I will try to make myself more opportunities in the future.

 Another intense meeting was with the senior leadership team later in the week. My project partners and I collaborated effectively to create a plan for the meeting to roll out as much information as we can for the team. We received compliments afterwards on how we came across in the meeting, which was great to hear!

 The week ended with the GES Student Network Christmas boat party. This was a greatly organised event which brought together students from all departments to celebrate before Christmas.

Week 4

I have been given two Discretionary Recognition Scheme (DRS) awards this week! One of these was for my input into the HMLR spending review and the other was for my hard work with my interviewing. It was great to hear compliments on my efforts: “Bella provided excellent challenge and objective opinion to candidates (and myself) ensuring that the process was fair and balanced….  Bella stepped outside of her work area showing a positive attitude, and a desire to understand the bigger picture across other practices… It is not hyperbole to say that without her the progression exercise could not have happened and its success is due in no small part to her participation.” These kinds of rewards from this organisation are crucial for making us feel like (even our small) efforts are not unseen and I feel driven to keep giving my best to the organisation.

 I had a great session with the senior leadership team this week to collect their opinions and rankings on the importance and urgency of different evidence gaps for the research programme in which my Benefits Evidence Gap (BEG) project is involved with. In this session, one of my project partners and I led an activity to collect this data. We held responsibility for preparing the exercise and for rolling it out. It was an overall success and I made lots of notes to catch up with our other partner next week after he is away.

 The other HMLR student rep and I were contacted this week by Newport’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) to start communications with them, beginning with an invite to their team meeting to talk about our work at HMLR and what a ‘day in our life’ consists of. The next step will be to embark on a shadowing scheme between our departments. This will involve them being partnered with one of our Economists/Analysts for a few hours of meetings to get that insight.

Week 5

This week is very short for me because, after Tuesday afternoon, I am on leave for Christmas. This festive period should be relatively quiet for everyone. My manager, however, has set us some important tasks to complete pending her arrival back in the office in January. The main task is to use our transformation analysis to write up our calculations into an economic annex. This is a big task and a very important exercise for us to nail because the work that we input here could end up being shown to the Treasury! This meant that on Monday, my grade manager and I had a meeting to catch up on how we will ensure that this activity is rolled out as efficiently and cleanly as possible. Being the coordinator for this area of our work, I am responsible for getting this right.

 On Tuesday, my final day, we have a Learning and Development (L&D) session, which my manager had suggested would be beneficial for us. It is a series of ‘roasting’ sessions, where we take it, in turn, to go through someone else’s economic model and provide them with constructive feedback in a session. This time, it was my turn to be ‘roasted’ and receive feedback. I decided to send in my carbon model because it hasn’t had a senior oversight yet so it will be interesting to see what my colleagues pick up. I know there are a few items which could do with improvement. It will be educational to understand what there is to be improved, however.

 I am looking forward to having a short break next week and being able to think about things outside of work for a while.