Senior Economics Officer
| Posting date: | 04 February 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £42,382 to £45,920 per year |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 15 February 2025 |
| Location: | M3 5DS |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 387625/3 |
Summary
We support the government workforce with the right skills and capability. We are working with leaders to get the right people in the right jobs, with the right skills and continuous learning to excel in their roles.
We provide leadership, and in turn, create leaders with exceptional line management capability across departments, influencing partners in the wider public sector and beyond. This involves getting our retention and reward strategy right, to nurture specific skills, and create pride and resilience in our workforce.
Our role is also to provide system leadership across central government in pulling together back office services. Collectively, we help support the Cabinet Office’s priority to drive efficiencies, and reforms that will make government work better, to ultimately provide a better service to the public.
Within the GPG, Government Skills was set up in 2020 to drive up capability across Government in an evidence-based and impact-led way. Government Skills ensures all civil servants, from entry to most senior leadership, have the core and specialist knowledge, skills and networks they need to deliver great public services and address complex systemic challenges, now and in the future. This work is central to the Public Sector Reform and Efficiency policy area, and supports Mission Delivery by ensuring the workforce has the capability and learning culture to deliver against the Government’s missions.
The Evidence and Impact team within Government Skills is responsible for ensuring that hundreds of millions of pounds of annual spend on developing the skills, knowledge and relationships of the Government workforce is evidence-based and impact-led. We use a combination of analytical methods covering monitoring/data analytics, social research, evaluation, statistics, behavioural and user research, and economic analysis to provide robust, purposeful insights to inform business decisions. Our evidence supports the creation of effective policy and strategy on the future skills needs of the government and wider public sector workforce, and supports effective design, commissioning and delivery of the interventions required to achieve this. The team has a reputation as a centre of expertise supporting the whole of government on these issues, and is expanding as part of plans for the next spending review period 2025-26.
You can find more information about Government Skills on our GOV.UK page: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/government-skills-and-curriculum-unit including our current Evaluation Strategy: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-campus-evaluation-strategy.
As Senior Economic Analyst you will lead on economic analysis and economic evaluation across Government Skills to understand the relationship between workforce skills, capability-building investments and critical outcomes including performance, productivity and mission delivery across government and the wider public sector. This will include developing models of economic evaluation which can drive greater impact (including performance, efficiency and productivity) and overall value from the significant investment made in workforce capability. Due to the implementation of Mission Delivery, and the current Spending Review, this is an exciting time to ensure that Government Skills is informed by a strong foundation of evidence and evaluation.
You will need an understanding of where Economic methods and insights can add value to policy and delivery decisions, and also what their limitations are, and working in collaboration with other analysts from a range of professions, and policy and delivery professionals, to deliver the best analysis and outcomes.
You will develop economic models to inform business cases, and as part of this, you will support the development of business cases, including conducting options appraisals, quantitative and qualitative value-for-money analysis and wider impact analysis across a range of projects, to ensure senior leaders are aware of all available options and related evidence, and help inform recommendations on the preferred way forward.
There are a wide range of analytical projects you may become involved with, being responsive to the priorities of the directorate and our wider stakeholders. This is likely to include producing modelling to support the appraisal of different options for future operating models for delivering a skilled Civil Service workforce, and the economic evaluation of several significant projects including a Government Major Project. .
You will work closely with the senior leadership team within Evidence and Impact and will contribute to the development, maturity and positive culture of the E&I team and the wider Government Skills Directorate.
Responsibilities will include:
- Leading on the development of business cases which quantify the potential impacts of large scale cross-Government projects, and effectively appraise different options.
- Leading the economic analysis and employing economic techniques within impact, process and value-for-money evaluations across various interventions
- Lead macro-economic analysis to quantify the nature of the relationship between workforce skills, capability-building investments and outcomes/delivery, including sourcing and developing appropriate measures, data sources and methods/models, collaborating with other teams across government and in other locations as required.
- Support the teams in meeting stakeholders’ evidence needs, using and developing your own knowledge of the evidence base and drawing on appropriate external evidence and expertise.
- Manage externally commissioned economic analysis projects, including being day-to-day contact as required.
- Contribute towards our (externally commissioned or internal) evaluation or research projects being robust, purposeful, efficient and aligned with the Government Campus Evaluation Strategy and other relevant guidance, including the Magenta Book and the Green Book.
- Holding, nurturing and leveraging stakeholder relationships in the Economics space (CO, cross-government and external).
- Contributing to the effective development of the Evidence and Impact Team by leading on at least one cross-cutting work area, for example, building capacity in economic evaluation across the team.
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