We knew from analysing our recruitment data that we sometimes find it hard to recruit digital and technical roles. I’ve seen how much effort goes into recruitment campaigns, and the frustration when that work doesn’t lead to a successful appointment.
To help us attract and retain digital talent, we have to make Parliament a digital employer of choice. And to do this, we need to reach audiences who might not think of Parliament as a place to have a digital career and increase the diversity of our talent pool.
This is important for us because having a diverse talent pool can bring different perspectives and lead to better decision making, as well as reflecting our wider society.
One way to do this is to create an employee value proposition (EVP) that could be used for all digital careers across Parliament.
An EVP at its simplest should clearly show potential candidates why Parliament is a great place to work and why they should apply for a role with us.
To kick off this work, we looked at what may be causing our challenges.
We knew that potential applicants might not think about Parliament as a place to have a digital career. And we also knew that potential applicants haven’t thought about digital roles because they don’t realise their skills are transferable.
I’m just one example. I began my parliamentary career in a visitor operations role, which I enjoyed, but eventually I wanted to try something different. I'd never thought about a role in digital, but I applied for a job I thought I could and do and was successful. I surprised myself, as I never thought the skills and knowledge I’d gained across my previous non-digital roles could be useful here.
I used to only think about big tech companies when I thought about digital careers. But since moving to PDS, I can now see that there are many digital and technical roles across Parliament, ranging from cyber security to data analysts, to content editors and delivery managers like me. There is a little bit of digital in pretty much everyone’s role.
We know that our existing staff have brilliant insight into what makes Parliament a great place to have a career, and how we can explain our work and culture to potential employees.
So, during our research, we asked colleagues what they enjoyed about working in Parliament. Some of the things they said were:
We also spoke to external people in digital roles to get a sense of what people who had no connection to Parliament thought about working here and what was important to them. Their feedback highlighted similar themes around Parliament being an interesting place, where you could potentially work on impactful things.
We used this research to help us define our EVP – that working in a digital role in Parliament is exciting, diverse, and impactful, and that we’re a supportive organisation where colleagues are trusted and can take pride in their work.
We concluded that every digital role, in some way shape or form, contributes to the successful running of Parliament. That’s why we chose as our proposition or strapline “Tech makes Parliament happen”.
The proposition comes with complementary branding, that we're starting to use in our job adverts, social media campaigns, and other touchpoints on the applicant user journey.
We’re really excited to be able to introduce our new digital employee value proposition. We hope this will support recruitment and retention, and that potential and current employees can see themselves represented, which will encourage them to apply for vacancies.
]]>Microsoft 365 is a suite of applications that includes Word, Teams, SharePoint, and many others. When it was first rolled out across Parliament in 2018, it had a big project team that provided training, guidance, and support to users. But when a project like this concludes, and the software keeps changing, there continues to be a need to keep our users up to date.
Software like Microsoft 365 is ‘Software as a service’, as is Adobe Creative Cloud, Jira, ServiceNow, and many other commonly used applications.
With software as a service, like Microsoft 365, updates are automatically rolled out in the background to organisations and users, usually on an uncertain or changing timetable. This is different to traditional software, which an organisation would manage directly, allowing them to communicate any changes in advance and give users a specific time frame to install or delay updates.
Microsoft calls these regular updates and new features ‘evergreen changes’. As a Microsoft 365 Learning Specialist, my role is to help Parliament manage them. Evergreen changes pose a real challenge for IT support and customers, who have to adapt to them as they are rolled out.
When I started in my position, I realised that I would need to keep an eye on evergreen changes to make sure my training courses and guidance stayed up to date.
It was also obvious that we had a significant gap in how we communicate these changes across Parliament.
If a major IT change was being planned, then we had a way of communicating this to our users. But smaller, less significant changes didn’t have an appropriate communications channel. We also didn’t have anyone proactively looking at upcoming evergreen changes – we were working more reactively in response to them.
There are a few teams in PDS whose focus is helping users get the most from digital tools. We put our heads together to think about this problem and decided to create a group to share updates, which we called the Digital Coaching & Adoption Forum.
This was a fortnightly meeting to discuss upcoming and released evergreen changes with customer-facing teams. We would run through my evergreen changes tracker and discuss the details of each update, including potential impact and its rollout timeline.
This proved to be a great way to keep customer-facing teams up to date with evergreen changes. But there remained the challenge of communicating the information to everyone in Parliament.
After considering several options, we created an internal blog, with monthly posts covering the latest features and updates that have been rolled out in Microsoft 365.
The blog is featured in a range of newsletters across Parliament every month, so anyone who wants to learn about these changes can find them. It gives us a way to communicate without overloading our audience.
Another aspect of our work has been encouraging a change of culture and attitude towards IT updates.
We hope our users are adapting to software updates that are frequent and rolled out in the background, and most importantly, that they are embracing the ever-changing and evolving range of applications that we have in Parliament.
It has been difficult to keep up with the pace of change with enough time for the many back-end teams and customer-facing teams to get on the same page.
This was especially challenging when we were rolling out Microsoft Teams. To facilitate meeting recordings, we had to move from the previous Office 365 Video app to Microsoft Stream. But during this process, Microsoft announced that they were redesigning the Microsoft Stream app to be part of SharePoint and OneDrive, rather than as a separate video platform.
In hindsight, this actually gave us an advantage as we saw the change coming and were able to plan long-term. However, it did present a big short-term challenge where we had to move our users from one application to another, knowing that in future we would have to move them again!
Beyond what we’ve created so far, we’re always thinking about other ways we could promote evergreen changes and help users develop their skills.
One idea that we’re looking at is introducing a coaching offer for Microsoft 365, where colleagues could discuss evergreen changes, new applications and any other features they would like to use in Microsoft 365 beyond the current training courses that we offer. In the spirit of evergreen changes, this idea is a work in progress for now!
]]>Parliament is a busy workplace, and our intranet has information about everything we need to know, from important news stories and events happening on the parliamentary estate, to health and wellbeing resources, or the practical information every workplace needs to share.
These stats show that from September 2022 to September 2023 Parliament’s intranet had:
Among our most visited news articles on the old intranet was information about Lying-in-State, the five-day period where Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin rested on public display prior to the State Funeral and burial.
An intranet is a private network that lets us share information and resources, a bit like a private website that’s only accessible to everyone who works at Parliament, including Members of both Houses and their staff. You probably use an intranet in your workplace, school, or university. It’s really important that an intranet acts as a place where colleagues can go to find timely, trusted and relevant information that helps everyone carry out their work.
So when our old intranet needed to be replaced, we brought together colleagues from PDS and the House of Commons and House of Lords to form the Intranet Replacement project, with the aim of jointly delivering a new intranet: ParliNet.
We decided we needed to build ParliNet from the ground up to ensure that it supports all of us here in Parliament, from MPs and Peers to HR managers and security officers, to carry out their parliamentary duties to the best of their abilities.
ParliNet has been designed based on user research and input from colleagues across Parliament at every stage of its development. From back when we were pulling together our list of requirements for what we wanted a new intranet to do, right through to testing the completed product right before we launched, we made sure our users fed into all our work.
ParliNet’s new structure has been created to help people who work for Parliament find the most relevant pages first and with the least amount of fuss. The simple structure and improved search function means that it’s much easier to find relevant information, with new tagging and filtering features and a completely redesigned information architecture (the skeleton that holds the site together).
All of the content on ParliNet has been audited to make sure it’s up to date, with our Content Designers going out to every team in Parliament ahead of them building their pages to ensure that the information on ParliNet is accurate and relevant for our users. We didn’t just want to copy across what was on our current intranet in case anything is no longer needed or had changed.
Our new design has a modern look and feel and meets accessibility standards. This was particularly key for us, as whilst a new look and feel makes the site much more interesting for all our users, it was really important that our users with accessibility requirements such as screen readers were able to use ParliNet and benefit from it.
ParliNet is mobile friendly which means it can be used almost anywhere our colleagues might be working and on any device. For example, if your MP is working in their constituency office on their mobile phone they’ll be able to check ParliNet just as easily as the Clerk of the House of Commons will when working in their office on the parliamentary estate.
One of the bigguest issues with our previous intranet was that it was hosted on an aging platform and contained some out-of-date information. To ensure that ParliNet continues to be useful for many years into the future, we’ve got lots of colleagues looking after the site. Our Software Engineering, Content, and Design teams will be making sure the technology stays up to date, while people like our Content Trainer directly supports editors across Parliament as they continue to grow and maintain their own content.
Our ParliNet Steering Group, the governance team that looks after ParliNet now that it’s live, will be gathering new ideas about how to continuously improve ParliNet. We’ll also be regularly measuring how the site is performing to make sure that its content stays up to date and accurate. We want to ensure that everyone in Parliament can always make the most of it, wherever they work and whatever role they do.
We’re really pleased with ParliNet, and couldn’t be more thankful to the hundreds of colleagues who’ve contributed to it in some way. From those who took part in our surveys to all our editors who built our pages, to our technical experts who did the complicated work behind the scenes. ParliNet was very much a team effort, and the end result is one we think is going to really improve the lives of everyone who works here.
]]>Recruiting people into technical digital roles and helping them develop their skills in-post has been a long-standing challenge for Parliament.
We’re not alone in this, and like the Civil Service more broadly, we’ve been working to improve our offer to people in technical roles, helping them to build a career that brings long-term rewards and challenges.
The Parliamentary Digital Careers Toolkit is a new initiative to support the career development of colleagues in technical digital roles in Parliament. There are lots of technical roles in Parliament that aren’t related to IT, so in developing the toolkit we wanted to be clear that it’s for technical roles with a digital or information technology focus, such as software engineering, data analysis or technical architecture.
The toolkit consists of a skills framework, a skills assessment tool, and a learning and development pathway.
The toolkit outlines the roles and skills needed to deliver digital and data services in Parliament. It’s a tool for individuals to plan their careers, but also a way of seeing how their work fits into the organisation’s priorities and key services. Colleagues have access to career pathways and can assess themselves against the skills they need or may benefit from in their current role or a future one.
The toolkit is a work in progress. We’re rolling it out in stages and we’re developing it all the time based on user feedback. The first step has been to focus on technical digital roles in PDS, launching the skills framework and the assessment tool to start.
Learning pathways that people can use to improve their skills will come next, followed by a new pay and reward strategy.
We’re also in the planning stages for rolling out the toolkit to colleagues in similar roles in areas of Parliament outside of PDS.
A big challenge in this work is being clear about the purpose of the toolkit and its benefits. Through the toolkit, everyone is encouraged to learn and be proactive about their own development, not necessarily because we think they should ‘climb the career ladder’.
Our guiding principle is that everyone can improve on something, and that learning a new skill can be personally as well as professionally rewarding.
There have been some rewarding surprises as well. We expected some teams with heavy workloads or non-standard working patterns to be more difficult to engage.
As it turns out, they have been some of the most engaged teams, with large turnouts at kick-off meetings that have led to interesting, challenging discussions. This has helped us improve our approach as we continue the rollout.
Emma Canny, our Interim Head of Software Engineering, has found the toolkit helpful in her role. She recently shared feedback with us on how it has helped her as an individual to understand her own skill gaps, and how it has helped her as a manager.
Emma said: “This is a useful tool to support and structure conversations with the people I manage. It provides the structure to discuss development, progress, and learning opportunities. The toolkit can help to support constructive feedback, too, which is also a healthy part of 1-2-1 conversations."
Next, we take it to the rest of Parliament! There are several digital roles outside of PDS in the Commons and Lords teams, and we want these colleagues to have access to the tool too.
We will use the data collected so far to do a few things, including to review how the toolkit is working for colleagues and measure the impact it’s having on recruitment and retention. We will also start building out learning pathways.
This is an important part of the toolkit, as it will help colleagues to see what they are working towards and what they need to do to progress or move to a different role, and hopefully empower them to shape the careers they want.
If you are interested in a role with PDS, browse our vacancies.
]]>I joined from a background quite a bit detached from the world of IT and digital, but I’ve come a long way since then.
My current role is Head of Customer Experience Management. In a nutshell, I help to ensure that we understand our customers – that is, MPs, Peers, their staff, and the wide variety of people employed by the House of Commons and the House of Lords who support the running of Parliament. It’s the sixth role I’ve held in PDS.
Before I joined Parliament, I had a very different career. I had studied languages and spent some time teaching at a university in France. After teaching, I was interested in working somewhere like Parliament. I’d had a little bit of experience with IT and customer service, and later on at university, I worked weekends in libraries.
It took me three attempts to get an interview for my first role in PDS. It took me a while to realise that I needed to talk about all the skills that I had learnt in my career, including while teaching, and not just the last role that I had done. I had assumed that none of my earlier experiences would be relevant, or that they were too long ago. Eventually, I managed to secure an interview, and then a role working on our IT Support Desk.
The Support Desk is the first point of contact for IT issues for everyone in Parliament. I loved it. It was the perfect way to get a feel for the diversity of the organisation, both in terms of the people and also the range of activities happening here.
Several colleagues from the Support Desk have since moved into other areas of the organisation. Some have pursued technical specialisms, while others have moved into roles as developers or project managers. It was a great springboard for helping me consider what I wanted to do next.
From there, I spent some time as a team leader on the Support Desk, then moved into a project and programmes role, helping to drive digital change. I developed an interest in project management and decided I wanted to know more.
There are several unique things about working in Parliament – the buildings, the unusual terminology you have to get used to, and so on. Another is how your work is influenced by politics and world events. I had the chance to volunteer on our work to support the 2017 General Election, and that opportunity gave me the experience I needed to move into my next role as a Project Manager in PDS.
But this isn’t the only type of opportunity Parliament offers. Over the years I’ve shadowed lots of different teams, from Bill Committees to Hansard.
I’ve also taken a week or two out of my normal role to support other activities, such as NATO Parliamentary Assemblies, the Speaker’s G7 conference, and even helping to arrange the opening ceremony for the OSCE PA in Birmingham (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly) last year.
I’ll never forget some of the highlights from those experiences, for example, meeting Nancy Pelosi at a reception in Chorley, or getting an entire orchestra on and off the stage on time at the OSCE PA. These were nothing to do with my day-to-day job but a real privilege to work on.
These activities gave me the experience and confidence to go for my next job – building a team in PDS dedicated to helping Members’ constituency offices – before moving to my current role.
I’m really lucky to be part of an organisation that is supportive of my development, offers variety, and lets you get involved in all sorts of things you never thought you would. I can only hope the next eight years are as eventful as the last.
If you’re interested in a career in Parliament, browse our current vacancies.
]]>Parliament recently partnered with Code First Girls to recruit and train seven women in data and product roles. This is part of our efforts to widen our talent pool and improve inclusion and diversity in digital and tech roles.
There is a gender gap in the tech industry. The 2022 pay gap data published by PDS benchmarks our data against an IT industry in which around 22% of employees are women. There are even fewer women in leadership roles, and a 16% gender pay gap across the entire industry.
Compared to these statistics, PDS is doing well. As our pay gap report shows, 41% of our employees are women. But that doesn’t mean that we as an organisation should think our work is done. A lot has happened in Parliament to support closing the gender gap, and this new partnership with Code First Girls is one example of our continued efforts.
The organisation Code First Girls was selected as an initial partnership to help close the gender gap in PDS. They work with women and non-binary people, and 53% of their community is from ethnicities under-represented in tech and 14% identify as neurodivergent. They have so far taught more than 120,000 people to code globally and partnered with more than 120 companies and 80 universities.
Parliament has worked with Code First Girls since the beginning of this year to establish what our partnership will look like. It was decided that we would recruit talent for our product team and data team. Candidates from Code First Girls were able to apply for roles, and they were then interviewed by managers within the relevant teams at Parliament.
One of the challenges of this project was thinking about the teams the candidates would be joining, and what the teams might need to support their new colleagues. Each candidate has heir own needs and requirements. We considered what’s already available in Parliament for employees, such as our workplace equality networks and career coaching, and how to make the best use of them.
With this being a new initiative for Parliament, we’re keen to get it right, but also learn along the way with feedback from everyone involved.
Parliament was overwhelmed with interest in these roles. We’re excited to welcome the successful candidates into their teams in September, where some will join our Product directorate, and others will join our Data team, all for a 12-month contract.
There are a few things we’d love to achieve from this partnership. Above all, we want to give our new colleagues enough experience, skills, and understanding to successfully apply for permanent digital and tech roles in Parliament.
We’ll also get feedback from our new colleagues throughout the placement about what we’re doing well and what we can improve on. This will help us continue our efforts in ensuring PDS is an inclusive and welcoming employer.
And finally, we’re looking at how we can continue this relationship beyond the first year. We’ll use the next twelve months to learn how best to support our new colleagues so that they have everything they need to develop and feel confident enough to apply for their next role. We are also continuing to explore other possible partnerships so we can continue to widen and diversify our digital talent pool.
If you are interested in joining PDS, browse our vacancies.
]]>IS 24/7 stands for Information Systems 24/7. The name of our team gives you a clue about our working hours. We work every day and night of the year except Christmas and Boxing Day. That means there is always someone from our team working a day or night shift to support the work of Parliament and its community.
We’re a diverse team and that’s reflected in our multi-disciplinary skills and experiences. To be successful in IS 24/7, you need to be a flexible team player, and a good communicator. This is because we wear different hats during the course of our working hours.
A typical day shift in IS24/7 begins at 7am when we take over from the night team that has been covering the Digital Support Desk in Parliament. This involves working with our third-party suppliers to implement changes to our IT systems and services, and being the eyes and ears for any IT issues overnight.
At the start of our day we cover the Support Desk for an hour before handing it over to the Support Desk team who do normal working hours. We then have some time for breakfast, usually visiting one of the friendly cafeterias on the parliamentary estate, before going to our daily catch-up meeting to discuss team workloads and agree on who is doing what for the day.
At this point our attention shifts to supporting our key customers, which include Hansard, the Table Office, Committees, clerks, and other teams whose work is crucial to the proceedings of both Houses of Parliament.
We work in a hybrid way, with some people on site to support parliamentary estate-based users and IT systems, and others working remotely. This enables us to meet our customers’ needs and also have a good work-life balance.
A typical case for us, as an example, might be a call from a clerk—whose role it is to advise on parliamentary business—reporting an issue with the voting system used by members during ‘Division’, which is a term used for when members are being asked to vote on a motion.
For us to respond in a timely manner and resolve the issue quickly, we usually have someone in our team working close to where our customers are based. We’re also now using an IT service management mobile app, which gives our team members access to the necessary information to resolve issues wherever they are in Parliament.
A typical night shift in the 24/7 team starts at 7pm. Just like at the start of the day shift, we have a handover with the departing team. This helps us understand any live issues or work that needs to be done overnight. For instance, recently we have been assisting the network and cyber security teams to implement changes that make our network and infrastructure more resilient.
These works are generally done out of hours because it’s less invasive for our customers. We also carry out pre/post-tests of our systems, services and network access, which might be impacted by the technical work being done. 'Out of hours' includes weekends and Bank Holidays too!
And if you ever wonder whether Westminster goes to sleep, we can tell you there is always something happening in and around Parliament overnight.
On one of our recent night shifts, we were fortunate to see the rehearsal of the King’s coronation guard parades, which gave us a glimpse of some of the events that were going to happen on the day of the Coronation.
Interested in joining PDS? Browse our latest vacancies.
]]>In 2021, I posted about the PDS content team’s strategy for 2020–22. I said I’d be back to update on progress, so here I am, a little later than planned.
To be brief, we achieved lots over the last two years, including:
This is great in isolation, but even more impressive in the circumstances. We worked on lots of things we had not expected to, like the move to remote working. That involved adapting our team processes, and how we interact with our editors and stakeholders, and how we train them.
We’re building on this work for 2023 and 2024 with two aims:
We’ll try to achieve these through five objective areas.
We’re going to help shape our team’s move to the Product directorate, defining ways of working and delivery principles for multidisciplinary working.
As a team, we’ll make sure we have the skills, resource, and capacity to embed content design expertise in product teams, iterating on our own ways of working so they benefit us, our directorate, and Parliament.
We work with hundreds of editors across Parliament. Part of our role is to give them the skills and confidence to manage content they’re responsible for.
We’re going to review our training offer and how we organise it, iterating on the good work we’ve started with our content community, making sure our guidance, standards, and resources are meeting the needs of our editors.
We’ll also establish regular reporting against our content KPIs.
We’re working on a CMS migration for Parliament’s intranet at the moment. We’ll be helping design how the pages and information architecture of the site work, as well as establishing clear and sustainable processes for how we manage the system.
This will fit with the work we’ll do with Product directorate colleagues to establish lifecycle management for the CMS we’ll be using for our intranet and parliament.uk.
Building on the work from our last strategy, we’ll implement the latest changes we’ve agreed, including a content policy for Parliament (coming soon…!), and work with Product colleagues to iterate on PDS’s design system.
We’re also going to produce a responsibility matrix for parliament.uk and our intranet, listing who’s responsible and accountable for content across both those sites, so teams are clear on their role and the role of other teams.
We’re working with editors to audit, iterate, and publish their content for the intranet migration, as well as working with Product directorate colleagues on our website enhancements process, so it benefits from multidisciplinary input.
The improvements we make do not stop once we’ve upgraded our CMS, so we’ll work with teams to optimise content, using data and research to shape our decisions.
I’ll be back to talk about how we’ve been getting on, and look out for more on our content policy soon!
In the meantime, if you have any questions or feedback, let me know in the comments. You can also browse our latest vacancies if you’re interested in joining the team.
]]>We wrote recently about the Transforming Digital programme, the benefits it aims to bring to Parliament, and how in the first 18 months of the programme we successfully laid the foundations for transformation.
The programme now has a year left to go, before moving into an ongoing transformation function for Parliament, and I’d like to share how we intend to spend the next 12 months.
Guided by our mission “to embed and operationalise the new digital and data operating model and establish an ongoing digital transformation capability”, we will:
By the end of March 2024 Parliament will have a refreshed strategic approach to digital and data which will continue to evolve and grow to respond to the needs of the parliamentary community.
This means that Parliament will have:
This work brings together colleagues across the Parliamentary Digital Service and Parliament to create a new and more sustainable approach to digital and data.
If you’re interested in joining us as we transform the way Parliament approaches digital, see our current vacancies.
]]>The UN marked International Women’s Day with the theme of innovation and technology for gender equality. Earlier this month, we held a conversation between two colleagues in PDS about their careers in digital so far, and the way they see their impact on promoting access to digital and technical roles in PDS. Julie is the head of digital capability, and Sarah works in the communications team.
I don't have a digital background at all. I started in Parliament in an administrative role in the catering team, later moving to a communications role in the facilities department. By the time I came to PDS, I understood the challenges faced by colleagues who didn’t have access to digital. It’s been interesting to be someone who has both experiences, and to be part of a change in how our work in PDS is approached.
Like you, I never wanted to work in digital. After temping for a while after university, I was offered a job working for Mercedes Benz in the business department as a systems analyst. I moved into the IT department later and gained a lot of insight into the relationship between business and IT, and the challenges involved.
Earlier in my career at Parliament, the most interesting part of working in digital, for me, was working in an agile way. When I was a project manager working with software developers, I loved it because it was like a whole other world: everyone was involved in the decision making, the work moved quickly, and you could update everyone easily. And that’s when I saw a big shift in how IT departments work with business areas. We’ve come a long way since then, but we've still got a lot to do.
Although I’m not in a technical role, I like being the person who can translate technology to everyone else who works in the system.
I see my role the same way. It’s not just sending out communications, it’s about making things accessible to a wider audience and ensuring that they feel involved in technology. Everyone in Parliament needs digital services to do their work – as an internal communications team, we can make tools and processes and changes easier to understand, and we can a build a sense of community within PDS that hopefully leads to a shared mission and better results.
I used to feel conflicted about defining my role in this way – it feels gendered, as a woman, to suggest that you are the conduit or the connector, as opposed to someone with more technical skills. But there is a place for this type of role to be celebrated. Something that could be done more in digital departments is having a greater sense of equity between different skillsets, as we need them all to succeed.
I agree with that 100%. I’m currently working on a project as part of our digital transformation programme to develop a parliamentary digital careers toolkit for PDS. Something that is important to this work is the idea that not all digital roles are technology roles. The toolkit will highlight the transferable skills that many roles need and skills that are essential to delivering digital services. We want it to be a useful tool for everyone. And to get there, that process has involved engaging with the diversity and inclusion teams in Parliament, our workplace equality networks, and senior leaders.
My role, your role, we’re not technical but we’re important in getting people to work with us as a department and understand what we do. They are cultural roles that are just as important as an architect or a data analyst or a software developer. And there is still a battle in getting more of a gender balance in technical roles, which is something I’ve worked on a lot over the years.
In recruitment, part of our role is around promoting PDS as a place to work via our blog and social media channels. There is definitely an inclusion aspect to how we market PDS and how we make sure that everyone – including women, people from different backgrounds, disabled people – feels like it would be a place for them. Previously, our Content team has looked at job descriptions to make sure they weren’t using biased language, and we do the same with our communications.
I was part of that project with the Content team! It encouraged us to watch for neutral language, and to use plain language as much as possible. Anybody who is applying for a role just wants to know what on earth they’re going to be asked to do in their job.
This work really influenced me. When I run events now, for example, I’m constantly thinking about the composition of the panels that I convene. I want the best people on a particular subject, and I also want to reflect the diversity of our organisation. We already have a diverse workforce relative to the tech sector, but by showcasing our culture and our people, we can hopefully make it easier for different kinds of people to see themselves joining our organisation across a range of teams and roles.
Part of building a strong culture is being your authentic self at work. It shows other people that they can be themselves too. You don’t have to be a particular kind of person to be a leader or a software developer – it’s not a one-size-fits-all thing.
Something that I have learnt that it’s ok to be the non-technical person in a technical meeting. Working in a hybrid way has made me feel more confident about this. It’s important for senior managers to see that they influence the dynamics of a situation, whether that’s in the decisions they make in forming a panel, or how they model behaviours in running a meeting.
I wish I had given more feedback when I was younger, and I think it’s important for senior leaders to be open to it. It helps create a culture of improvement.
If I could give my younger self some advice, I would tell her not to worry about using non-digital examples of my skills and experience when applying for jobs. I think in PDS, we’ve tried hard to create a culture where different perspectives are welcomed and celebrated. I’m really proud of any part I’ve played in that.
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If you’re interested in becoming part of the team, browse our latest vacancies.
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