Career story: How to excel in open government

What does a day in your shoes feel like? And what are the key skills that can make or break a career in your field?

We have asked a diverse group of Apolitical members to share their career story with us and the tips they have for junior public servants. In this article, Benedict Stefani explains why it’s impossible to boil down the culture of an international organisation to one single unit.

What is your role in government and how do you spend your time on a standard workday?

I am Junior Policy Analyst at the OECD’s Open and Innovative Government Division. At the OECD Secretariat, we support governments by providing data, analyses, and recommendations. My unit focuses on Open Government — a dynamically evolving field, whose relevance has once again been proved during the pandemic. Our aim is to make governments more transparent, accountable, and participatory.

A workday can vary heavily as the priorities and tasks of the day depend on where we currently stand in our diverse projects. For example, the development of open government indicators has been one project we have been working on for months, and we have designed a questionnaire that serves as one data source for these indicators. Transforming this questionnaire into an intuitive Excel file to be filled out by respondents in government has been one of my tasks of the past weeks. I also wrote a code to extract all that information from the excel files, restructure and store it in a useful database format for later analysis. At the same time, we have been drafting chapters for an Open Government Handbook for Civil servants and prepared fact-finding missions for an Open Government Review. For those interested, news and publications surrounding our work can be found on our division’s website.

 In your opinion, what are the most important skills someone needs to excel in your field?

Of course, this starts with being enthusiastic about the topic. In fact, open government is a wide field and there are many fascinating facets to it. We have colleagues working on rather specific topics, such as representative deliberative processes, and others working on the very foundations of an open government in the form of civic space. When you care about these topics, working does not feel that much like working and the output you produce is better.

As most deliverables we produce provide policy recommendations, it is straightforward that research skills stand at the core of what we are doing: A quick wit of relevant input, methodological rigour, concise and comprehensible drafting etc.

Given that we work in teams and on behalf of government administrations, good communication skills with colleagues and with external stakeholders are essential. Being able to do so in multiple languages is definitely a big advantage. Lastly, I believe that data literacy including the knowledge of related programs such as R or Python is becoming paramount to make use of the growing amount of data available to us.

 What is your favourite part of your job? What would you change if you could wave a magic wand?

In my job, I get to read and write about the topic that I care about most and thereby contribute to improving governments. It is a great privilege to work on this topic and to have such a positive impact. Nevertheless, the work environment is equally crucial to enjoy your job, and I am very thankful for what I can learn from my colleagues and supervisors and how we deliver together on our projects. Thus far, my time at the OECD has been very enriching both professionally and personally.

My time at the OECD has shown me that such a huge organisation with so many different elements and diverse staff cannot be accurately captured in a few words

While I think that we provide a relevant contribution, there are limits to what we can achieve with our work. To the extent that the pandemic has shown how critical an open government is, I am concerned about anti-democratic developments in some countries. I wish that more people would be able to recognise deceptive and fear-mongering tactics of some political leaders and that they take initiative beyond the ballot box by using the means of an open government to the extent possible. Ultimately, we need engaged and informed citizens that constantly co-produce solutions to society’s problems — or get involved themselves and run for office.

 What advice would you give to young public servants who are interested in a career in your field?

I am still in an early stage of my career. Nevertheless, one piece of advice I can give on a general note is that working in international organisations is a highly contested field and negative replies should not discourage you to re-apply with an improved application.

Besides, my time at the OECD has shown me that such a huge organisation with so many different elements and diverse staff cannot be accurately captured in a few words. The OECD can mean different things to different people depending on who you ask — every directorate, every division, every unit differs from one another in some ways. Based on what I have heard from other colleagues, I assume that this is similar in other large international organisations. Hence, I would recommend talking to or exchanging messages with people that work in similar positions you are interested in, to find out whether the job actually fits what you’re hoping to get from it.

My LinkedIn profile is available here (Benedict Stefani). Feel free to shoot me a message if you have any questions. I look forward to hearing from you. – Benedict Stefani

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(Picture credit: Unsplash/Benedict Stefani)