Senior Policy Adviser: Resilience and Crisis Management

The successful candidate will lead an exciting, varied and challenging portfolio of work to grow DCMS’ resilience and crisis management capability, working closely and building strong relationships across the department and Whitehall.

Building on the team’s existing crisis management capability, you will develop our approach to resilience as we identify and explore acute risks facing the department. You will assess their impacts and prioritise accordingly, allowing senior leaders to allocate limited resources effectively. You will then play a key role in building and testing the contingency plans that will allow an effective response should these risks crystallise.  As part of this, you will work with a number of teams to coordinate thinking around the implementation of Martyn’s Law and the changes that will need to be encouraged in DCMS sectors.

You will also work with teams that are building our approach to resilience in the voluntary and community sector to shape policy at an early stage of development as we seek to maximise the impact of voluntary organisations in response to national crises.

Working with partners across Whitehall, you will maintain a clear understanding of wider government resilience policy, identifying where this will affect DCMS and preparing responses as necessary. You will represent DCMS’ interests and policy goals at cross-government fora.

Person specification

The ideal candidate will have the following key skills and experience:

Essential criteria:

• Experience in a crisis management or resilience role in government, armed forces, emergency services, NGO or similar.
• Confident leading complex work and exercising initiative within a broadly defined area.
• Comfortable assessing information from a range of sources and building a cogent position.
• Builds and maintain effective, impactful working relationships with a range of partners.
• Confident and capable communicator able to effectively engage senior leaders and produce excellent written work that is clear, concise and well-argued.
• Strong and supportive manager who can reassess and reprioritise work in response to changing circumstances.

Desirable criteria:

• Familiarity with the Central Government Concept of Operations (Responding to Emergencies) and/or its successor, the Amber book.
• Experience of risk assessment and contingency planning in a resilience context.
• Strong and supportive manager with experience of both direct and matrix management.

We are running an information session where prospective applicants can find out more about the role. This will be hosted by Jon Ryder and will take place on:

• Monday 14 April, 1315-1345

The session will be an opportunity to hear more about the role, the team and wider directorate and the department. It will also be an opportunity for you to ask any questions.

Please register for this through our advert post latest by 0800 on Monday 14 April and you will be sent an invitation.

Please note that the session will not focus on the DCMS recruitment process - please direct any queries that you have on this topic (timelines, reasonable adjustments, onboarding etc) to recruitment.team@dcms.gov.uk