My last day on secondment
#weeknotes — 2 days early
I’m publishing my week notes on Wednesday this week as today marks the final day of my secondment to the expert advice team (hence the desk full of flowers and chocolate!)
I joined the team in March part-time, moving over to full-time at the beginning of April. I spent a bit of time with my manager recently writing down and reflecting on what I’d achieved in that time — so I wanted to share some highlights and learnings.
Working with the Brexit team to monitor relevant legislation
One of the biggest parts of my role has been working as part of the Brexit team to make sure we’re on top of the legal process and its potential impact. While people are used to hearing about the political aspects of Brexit on the news, the legal cogs have been turning behind the scenes — hundreds of statutory instruments have been passed, covering topics as fundamental as EEA nationals’ rights to benefits and social housing.
I’ve spent a lot of time on Hansard, parliament’s website, gov.uk, LexisNexis and more, making sure we’re across these legal changes and their potential impact on the millions of people Citizens Advice helps every year.
Launching Adviser online
A big priority for me during my secondment was helping the team launch Adviser online, a new platform to help support advisers to give accurate, up-to-date advice. Adviser online is a totally free site jam-packed with articles, commentary, guides and other resources, covering:
- Benefits
- Consumer
- Debt
- Discrimination
- Employment
- Housing
Launching the platform has been a lot of hard work from the team, so it’s great to see that thousands of people have been accessing it and that the initial feedback we’ve received has been positive. I’ll be continuing to work on the site from a comms perspective when I finish my secondment, so I’m looking forward to keeping the momentum going.
Being a recruiting manager
I’ve been involved in recruitment at Citizens Advice and previous organisations before, but not as a recruiting manager. This means writing the job description, getting it live, deciding where it should be advertised, shortlisting and selecting candidates for interview, arranging the interviews, writing the task/questions — essentially project managing the whole thing.
The recruitment was extremely popular — over 150 applicants — so shortlisting candidates for interview was intense. It was also challenging, as the calibre of applications was so high.
Luckily it’s all been worth it: we’ve found an extremely excellent candidate for the role and I’m looking forward to them starting.
The expert advice team is amazing
I hadn’t worked an awful lot with the expert advice team before my secondment. I knew they were all lawyers/subject matter experts in their fields, but I didn’t really understand what a day in their life looked like or the variety of work they cover.
I’ve been consistently impressed by how expert the experts in the team really are — ask them any question about their subject area and they’re all over it. A nice illustration of this is feedback we’ve received on a national staff event we ran yesterday. It’s so nice to get comments like “you’ve all done an amazing job” and “it’s quite unbelievable how much work you have all had to do”.
Thank you to the expert advice team for having me!
Next steps
I’m back in my substantive role — Communications Officer at the communications and engagement team — as of tomorrow. I’m looking forward to getting stuck back into the role and to reconnect with colleagues that I haven’t worked with for the past few months.
Also this week…
- I went to an exhibition at Finsbury Park about its 150 year history. There’s going to be a free Latin festival there this weekend, which I’m planning on grabbing some food at (weather depending).
- I discovered a podcast, Flight of Fancy, that I like.
- I met my sister’s dog — he’s called Tofu.
Have a nice week/weekend!
