Silence fell over the office as the general election was called. It was 22 May. Only a month ago, the OOC-DTP had arranged for me to spend 12 weeks on a placement with the Open Innovation Team at the heart of government. It now turned out that they had sent me to the epicentre of a political earthquake.
Even without election announcements, PhD placements are exciting with the Open Innovation Team (OIT), a taskforce based in the Department for Education which takes project commissions from across the Civil Service. Small cohorts of PhDs arrive every quarter for secondment with over 20 civil servants, either in-person by Westminster Abbey or remotely. Theirs is no ‘tea-making’ exercise. It is 3 months of researching, writing, and presenting as a fellow technician of government, whose co-produced outputs can (and in my case, did) reach the highest levels of the Civil Service, including Director Generals and the Cabinet Office.
Placements are a change of both content and pace from academia. If a PhD can be (as some colleagues have joked) a marathon in a secluded tunnel, then the placement is a series of sprints through a crowd. I was writing immediately on multiple policy areas I never knew existed, as diverse as renewable energy technologies, local government mechanisms, and the regulatory space of video games, to name but three. The experience offered continuous pivot, mastering how to absorb new briefs quickly enough to present to others whilst supported by empathetic colleagues who were finishing or had completed PhDs themselves. This atmosphere of constant feedback was the placement’s crux. Individual training needs were fostered by weekly meetings with line managers (in my case, a former PhD placement student). They maximised potential opportunities and built up our confidence through a curated mixture of diverse assignments.
The imposition of pre-election restrictions left us unable to interview contacts outside the Civil Service. Consequently, I threw myself into OIT’s training programmes, where academics and postgraduate students are mentored through on-campus classes in how to engage effectively with government. There was some irony to delivering these: a PhD student amongst civil servants, only months in the post, who was referred to by academics as a ‘civil servant’ and vice versa. Yet this perfectly encompasses the challenge and responsibility afforded by the OIT. Their work makes better policy-makers out of academics and better academics out of policy-makers. In the case of PhD placement students, it makes us better as both.
My placement ended on 5 July, just after we met in the office lobby to line the arrival of the first Secretary of State for Education from a different political party in fourteen years. This remarkable opportunity was only made possible thanks to the OOC-DTP and the OIT, and I am grateful for their encouragement and support at every stage. Both are contactable at any time, even just to explore options, and I would encourage anyone with even the slightest interest to do so. Who knows, it might take you somewhere unexpected…
