I work in a small project team aiming to make government policymaking more innovative. Heavy emphasis on bringing new and existing methods into government such as design thinking, systems thinking, systems mapping, user research and user-centred design.

Working in a group of ~1400 colleagues, I hold a strategic business partner relationship with key areas, and bring them together to feed into a collective vision and strategy for the post-16 skills education system for 2030, the reform for which was set out in the 2021 White Paper - Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity & Growth.Within this team, I also lead on the User Journeys project, which applies user-experience and service design methodology to help us better understand and shape the skills system through the lens of our two main customers - learners and employers.I also play a continual role in monitoring the department's stakeholders for skills policy, producing tools for colleagues to help them keep on top of the conversation in our area.

I'm currently working as part of a small strategy team that looks to improve how the DfE engages its key stakeholders. Within this team, I lead on identifying and recommending technical and non-technical solutions for how we can better co-ordinate stakeholder activity, share stakeholder and user feedback, and generally ensure that policymakers within the department are well looped in to what's happening on the ground in the post-16 education and skills system so they can design better policy.I ran a short user-centred design project looking into how the department could better capture and share stakeholder intelligence through use of a CRM. My slide deck has been submitted to 5 directors, with a firm recommendation based on user experience and user needs.

After joining the DfE, I took the opportunity for a 3-month loan to the DfE's User Centred Design Lab, where I worked as part of a project team tasked with researching and mapping how employers interact with the further education system. When this project ended, I was offered a full-time position in a related team, working on stakeholder engagement for the Skills for Jobs reform programme of the further education and skills systems.

After leaving Defra I joined the ESFA on promotion, utilising my strengths and experience in financial analysis and government stakeholder engagement to take up a role as a finance and governance caseworker for failing academy schools in England.

After completing the assessment centre for the UK Civil Service Fast Stream, I was offered a role (through the direct appointment scheme) on Defra's EU Exit Strategy team for my experience in stress and scenario testing.Joining a small team of six, I was able to lead and shape the initial planning and approach to various EU Exit scenarios. As the team and wider EU-Exit functions grew, I was able to cover and contribute to other areas of work including: briefing and submissions writing for ministers; stakeholder engagement and communications; project and programme management; and supporting colleagues with the secondary legislation process.A highlight was leading a project to create 55 plain-English, one-pager, 'narrative' documents to cut through the policy jargon and explain, in layman's terms, the purpose for each of the 55 EU Exit projects the department was leading. The feedback from these documents was fantastic, and they were subsequently used in a variety of situations including external communications and briefings for key internal and external stakeholders. I left this team on promotion to a role in the the Department for Education, the policy area for which I am most passionate about, as demonstrated by my dissertation on the topic of higher-education policy.

After university, I took up a graduate position on the actuarial training scheme where I had interned the previous year. This was my first job, and consisted of a full-time position alongside a supported study programme for the professional actuarial exams, for which I was given 30 days of study leave per year and for which I passed exams in finance, financial reporting, financial mathematics, and business economics.My role was in the stress and scenario testing team, where I created an new actuarial calculations process from the bottom-up. This comprised the creation of dozens of new and inter-linked excel spreadsheets, which also had to work in combination with specialist actuarial software, to help run the stress and scenario tests required by the regulator. After designing, creating and executing this process for two years in a row, my competence and empathy for designing clear, easy-to-use spreadsheets was recognised, and I was asked to work with external contractors to re-design over 100 other calculations spreadsheets within the firm. I left this graduate scheme to pursue an opportunity in the Civil Service, where I was head-hunted to work on scenario testing and strategy for the UK's biggest challenge of the time - withdrawal from the European Union. This allowed me to pursue my strong interest for public service, which I obtained from my degree in PPE.

My interests and studies in maths and economics led to me to initially pursue a career in actuarial science, where I was able to secure a summer internship with a locally-based, UK-wide life insurance firm. As an intern, my natural aptitude for process improvement and eye for detail were apparent, leading me to me spot and fix errors in seven different calculation spreadsheets, thereby improving the accuracy of the calculation process by 32%. After a successful internship, I was offered a job on the graduate actuarial trainee programme, which I took up the following year after my graduation from Durham.

- Approached customers in a friendly manner to take food and beverage orders and payment.- Dealt with customer's issues and complaints. - Assisted customers with the use of the electronic golf system.- Worked as a dependable member of a young team.