Summary
The role of Ofcom’s Competition Group is to help businesses compete fairly in the telecommunications, postal and broadcasting sectors. We intervene with regulation where we think this can make a significant difference to how communications services work for consumers.
Team Overview
The role of Ofcom’s Competition Group is to help businesses compete fairly in the telecommunications, postal and broadcasting sectors. We intervene with regulation where we think this can make a significant difference to how communications services work for consumers.
Policy-making is a vital part of what we do at Ofcom. It involves understanding a problem that people are experiencing and designing options and solutions to solve it. Great policy-making involves working together to pool expertise and ideas to get the best results. We work with teams and groups across Ofcom to look to solve consumer issues by helping businesses compete to provide high quality services at value for money prices.
Purpose of the Role
We are looking for someone to join our Competition Policy team based in either Edinburgh or London. You will work to develop UK-wide competition policy in the industries we regulate and make competition work for UK consumers and businesses. As a policy specialist you will solve complex problems, working with specialists, including economists and lawyers in cross site teams.
Ofcom’s corporate values are excellence, collaboration, agility and empowerment. These are reflected in everything we do. We welcome applications from people who are keen to contribute to these values and have the necessary skills for the role.
Requirements of the Role
You will support your project managers in delivering one or more projects or workstreams, taking ownership of the delivery of a workstream or an aspect of the project, and managing your own workload.
You will produce workplans, identify deliverables and agree timescales. You will work with colleagues from different specialisms, including lawyers and economists, to ensure milestones are met. You will contribute to policy development by actively participating in group discussion, presenting policy options and translating the inputs of specialist colleagues so that others can understand.
As part of the project team you will analyse and develop the policy options available and seek to understand the issues affecting your project
You will produce internal documents that support our policy making and support the publication of our proposals and decisions. This will include collating information from a range of different sources and communicating legal, economic and technical information clearly to a range of audiences.
You will also contribute to other work supporting Ofcom’s corporate values, for example contributing to training and development, and diversity and inclusion.
Ofcom is an agile organisation and project teams often include colleagues based in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. We use technology such as video calling to work together effectively. If you are based in our Edinburgh office, to welcome you in the best possible way and to enhance our project work, we will ask you to spend some time in our London office over your first few weeks, and from time to time depending on project needs.
Skills, knowledge and experience
Skills, knowledge and experience
Our Competition Policy Associates come from a variety of different academic and career backgrounds, and have developed their skills in many different roles and sectors. The core skills for the role are:
Policy development:
You will have experience or understanding of policy development in a regulated industry or government, or problem solving within a commercial organization.
Written communication:
You will be able to write and edit professional documents, producing succinct and logical drafts.
Face to face communication:
We develop our policies through group discussion, so you need to be able to communicate arguments, and be prepared to listen and contribute to debate.
Project management:
You will have experience of taking ownership of your own work, workstreams or small projects. You will need to be able to produce workplans, identifying deliverables and timescales, assist with management of internal governance processes as well as managing the input from other colleagues to ensure quality and timely delivery
Problem solving and analysis:
You will need to be able to develop logical approaches to your research and analysis to understand key issues, respond to new information or evidence and generate credible options for action
Qualifications
You do not require any specific academic qualifications for this role, but we will be looking for evidence of your ability to solve problems that have legal, economic and technology dimensions, to explain your thinking effectively to different audiences and to deliver projects.
An undergraduate degree could be a relevant indicator, as could relevant professional experience.
If you are interested in the role, we invite you to submit an up to 500-word covering letter explaining your relevant skills, knowledge and experience and why you want to join the Competition Policy team at Ofcom as an Associate. Instead of a covering letter, you can send us a short video (up to two minutes).
Please also ensure you have submitted your CV. We welcome applications from candidates who would like to work flexibly or part time, so please tell us what your preferred working arrangements are.
Ofcom is an equal opportunities employer. It wishes to reflect the diversity of contemporary UK society and is therefore actively seeking to recruit colleagues from all cultural and ethnic backgrounds as well as those who have a disability
Office address
Edinburgh or London, United Kingdom