Working to make government more effective

Institute for Government

Careers

Join our team to make a real impact on government effectiveness.

The Institute for Government is an exciting and friendly place to work. Our team is making a real impact in the world of government and politics, working to make government more effective and improve the way it makes decisions.

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Our work and values

At the IfG, our mission is to improve the effectiveness of government.

We focus on government structures and processes: on how government organises itself, develops and delivers policy, and evaluates and regulates its own activities. This makes us different from most other think tanks, where more often the focus is on specific policies.

To achieve our mission of making government more effective, we work with senior civil servants and politicians in Westminster, Whitehall, and in the devolved administrations and English regions to provide fresh thinking and evidence-based advice through research, events and leadership development.

We seek in all our activities to be:

  • Innovative, pushing at the boundaries of current knowledge, experimenting with diverse approaches to find the best solution.
  • Rigorous, thorough and precise in our methods - aspiring to produce the highest quality data and analysis.
  • Impartial, neutral and politically non-aligned.
  • Trusted, earning the confidence of all those we work with, and being open and challenging as well as a trusted guardian of knowledge.
Houses of Parliament from the IfG roof

Who we’re looking for

If, like us, you are fascinated by government and passionate about helping to improve the way it works, the IfG might be the place for you. We need people with all sorts of skills to help us catalyse improvements in government effectiveness: 

  • In our research team, from interns to programme directors, we need strong communicators with great analytical skills, who can get stuck into rafts of complex information, pinpoint the most interesting and important parts and make clear, practical, evidence-based recommendations for change. 

  • Our communications team includes professionals working on everything from marketing and digital content to events delivery and editorial oversight for our publications – for these roles, we’re looking for people who are great multi-taskers with cool heads under pressure and excellent attention to detail.  

  • In our partnerships team, people skills are really important – these are the colleagues who engage with external partners to secure funding for our projects. They need to be approachable and confident, and able to work with senior people, build relationships effectively and deliver on commercial agreements. 

  • Making sure the whole organisation runs smoothly is the operations team, which incorporates all the IfG’s finance, facilities, IT and administrative support functions. In this team, you need to be flexible, resourceful and reliable, with a can-do attitude and willingness to think on your feet.  

Across all teams, we’re looking for highly organised, enthusiastic people with great interpersonal skills and the ability to produce high-quality work – often to tight deadlines and in a rapidly changing working environment. If that sounds like you, take a look at our current vacancies.  

If you have any questions about recruitment at the IfG, please get in touch via recruitment@instituteforgovernment.org.uk.  

A member of IfG staff looking at a computer screen

Diversity and inclusion at the IfG

The Institute for Government is committed to creating and maintaining a diverse and inclusive working environment. We recognise the significant value that a diverse staff brings to our work, enabling us to draw on a wider range of experience and perspectives to inform the research that we do – both in the topics that we choose to explore, and the ways that we go about exploring them. We aim to foster a workplace culture where everyone feels valued and welcome no matter their gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality or socio-economic or other background. 

There is still further to go for us to fully achieve this goal – a challenge we have in common with the wider think tank sector. Several groups remain underrepresented among IfG staff (in the research team in particular) and among think tank employees more broadly, including but not limited to those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds, those from minority ethnic backgrounds and those with disabilities.  

We have a number of measures in place which are aimed at increasing the diversity of our workforce, and we continue to actively consider and experiment with other strategies to help us deliver on this commitment. These include: 

  • We use an anonymised online recruitment process to help eliminate bias and to identify the strongest candidates regardless of background.

  • Our recruitment process tests people’s skills, and assesses how candidates would respond to challenges they could face on the job, rather than relying solely on previous experience as a marker of capability.  

  • We do not use where candidates went to school or university as an assessment criteria. 

  • We collaborate with a range of other think tanks to host annual outreach events for people at the start of their careers from groups currently underrepresented in the sector. You can find recordings from the most recent event on our website.  

  • We have increased the length of our graduate internship contracts from six to 12 months, to encourage applications from candidates looking for longer contracts and those from outside London.  

In 2022 members of our research team undertook a research project, including surveys and focus groups, into the barriers to recruitment of candidates from under-represented groups and how the IfG compares with other organisations. We are using their recommendations to inform our future outreach and other activity. 

We will continue to seek out the most able candidates from as wide a range of backgrounds as possible, welcoming recruits to a supportive and inclusive work environment where all can achieve their potential in contributing to the IfG’s mission.