So you want to work in policy - Part III - More Applied Skills

This is part three of a multi-part series to support folks who want to make the transition into a policy role.

Here is Part One and Part Two.

This next article focuses on some applied skills that are crucial to making the leap to being a policy advisor. As with the entire series, I have interviewed some folks who have made the leap successfully.

Conceptual thinking: Principally, the ability to understand the existing constraints and find solutions to a policy problem within them. At the higher levels of policy advice roles, this will include generating a range of solutions to complex policy problems.

From interviewees:

“I’d add strategic thinking. It is a bit harder to understand if you have been working in the nitty gritty. In my case, I’d been focussed on how to serve clients and how to support ease of delivery. Now I need to focus a bit more on how to align my work with other issues at play in my Department.”

In a similar space to strategic thinking, clearly understanding senior management expectations: “I thought I knew what senior management wanted from my time in operations, but I find in policy this can vary a lot more based on the current situation of the [section] and the ongoing work/discussions happening at higher levels. There’s a lot more direction that comes from above, than I saw in operations, and that influences the work that we do and the advice that we give. I find that in policy it’s even more important to stay aware of everything happening in the Department, and possible interactions with our work, to be able to document those interactions or simply include a nod to them in advice going up.”

“I’d add time management. The work can be a combination of trying to work on longer think pieces and responding to shorter turn taskings. You’ll need a strategy to fit it all in.”

Two interviewees added data analysis, and one gave the following caveats for understanding the particular intersection of policy advice and data:

“[T]he interpretation of the data in policy, and the use of the data to inform decision-making is, in my experience, a lot more complex than what I am used to. There are fewer opportunities to collect additional data, unless you have a position explicitly created for this reason, so the challenge becomes the interpretation and use of the data that is readily available, with all its strengths and limitations, and the complex interactions between data sources (on different programmes with similar objectives etc.). Context had always been key to data interpretation for me, but using this skill in the policy sector involved a whole new dimension of sophistication because the data are collected for program design and evaluation purposes, rather than for the very specific purpose they were collected in during my earlier career/position. The data you have only provides some of the story.”

This same person noted that conversations may lean toward the more theoretical, and not all data is as informed as it could be through the benefit of feedback loops with the front line workers or citizens.

This article concludes the section on applied skills that may be useful in policy roles. The next article will be about behaviours that may be helpful in policy roles.