Policy for Campaigns 09: Skills for policy
What skills do you need to work in policy?
What skills do you need to work in policy? Or, if you’re looking to hire someone, what skills should you be seeking? This article explores the skills that organisations need when developing their policy capability. It’s not so much about career structures and development, although that comes into it (and could be the subject for a future article, if there’s interest).
1. What employers look for
As an exercise to get started off with, I went through an assortment of job descriptions for policy roles currently or recently advertised, mostly at mid-to-senior levels. There was a lot of commonality between them, and identifying a common set of skill requirements was pretty easy. Not all mentioned general skills such as proficiency in widely used software packages, being able to plan and prioritise work, line management skills and so on: but these are things that can apply in any area of work, and are not what we’re interested in here.
Across all the various job descriptions, there was a group of skills that seem to me to relate quite specifically to policy. You may well find some of them in job descriptions for related roles, such as in public affairs (and of course for broader-based roles that clearly encompass multiple disciplines), but they seem to me to be central to policy. They are:
Comprehension skills, including for monitoring and horizon-scanning
Analytical skills, often expressed and broken down in multiple ways, including…
The ability to work with evidence to develop analysis and policy
The ability to analyse data, quantitative or qualitative
Written communication skills, including the ability to write reports, briefings and speeches
Oral communication skills, including presenting reports
The ability to commission and/or undertake research.
There are a couple of other themes that crop up fairly often in JDs, although probably not often enough to regard them as “core” skills. That said, I’d argue they probably should be. They are:
Working and engaging with supporters
Sound judgement.
The second large group of skills can be categorised as those that are needed in order to perform at a high level as part of a policy and campaigning function, though perhaps slightly to the side of the specifics of the policy work itself. Often these pertain particularly to more senior roles. They are:
Relationship-building (and holding) skills – internally (including senior leaders) and externally (including government departments, politicians, etc.)
Leadership
Strategy
Communication / media / digital skills
Event delivery
Attention to detail
Interest / knowledge in or about politics, current affairs.
Is there something you’d expect to see on that list that I didn’t find? Or something that should be sought but often not considered? Let me know in the comments.
2. Analytical skills / degree-level education
I particularly want to examine analytical and writing skills, which it seems to me are central to policy work. They are not enough on their own for you to work successfully as a policy professional: the demands of any policy role are wider and more complex, as the lists above show. But they are core to what non-policy colleagues will expect the policy function to bring to the table.
So when we talk about analytical skills, what do we mean? Everyone will have their own answer to that, reflecting their own tastes and preferences. Mine is that it involves identifying causation and what matters to it. From a complex mass of information, can you disregard the bits that don’t matter, and identify why things are happening? If you ever end up in an argument with someone that veers all over the place and involves them regularly moving to new (if related) points in a stream of “what about”, it suggests the person you’re speaking to doesn’t have strong analytical skills, and the ability to focus on what really matters in any given set of circumstances.
But what sort of information do you need to be able to cut to the heart of? This will vary, and you need to be able to do it across a range of different types. It might involve information presented verbally, either in text or in speech. Or it might involve data. A training in sophisticated statistical techniques isn’t a requirement for an average policy professional, though it’s a boon if you have it. Many of us get by with being able to understand data and interrogate it using more basic techniques. But you need to be able to avoid being thrown by spurious figures or percentages, as often used in top-level political messaging, for instance: you need to understand whether the impressive-sounding amount of extra spending that’s just been announced, for instance, is enough or not.
Do you need a degree to develop the analytical skills required for policy work? As a rule of thumb, I’d say probably, yes. Sadly just having a degree doesn’t guarantee that an individual has the necessary skills, but equally it’s important to remember that a degree isn’t just an award, but is a process through which the person (in theory) learns things and is shaped by their learning. Degree-level learning is the most obvious route to obtaining the analytical skills needed for policy work: they might be obtained through other routes, but it’s less common.
Many people working in policy also have a master’s degree specifically in public policy or similar. How important is it to have one? Well, you’re getting this view from someone who never studied for one, so bear that in mind when I say I don’t think it’s essential from a skills perspective. I say that on the basis that I’ve never really been able to tell, without being told, whether a policy person I’ve been dealing with has a master’s or not. But that could just speak to my lack of first-hand knowledge. Aside from skills though, there are numerous good career-related reasons for considering one: it can be a useful tool for moving into policy work from a related, or even unrelated, sector without a track record of prior policy experience to point to; and some more senior roles cite it as a firm requirement. While I’m not sure it’s seriously harmed my performance (though who knows what I might have taken from one…), not having a master’s may well have harmed my career in terms of being considered for a new role at some point, though I’ll never know for sure.
3. Writing skills: policy is creative
Talking of applying for new roles, however: I once found myself giving an answer in a (successful) job interview where I said something I hadn’t realised I thought up to that point. Asked what I liked most about policy work, I said that it is creative.
Quite a few years later, I stand by this. Saying that policy is creative doesn’t mean that you just get to make it up (or at least, it shouldn’t).
But it does involve producing outputs that will very often be written, or otherwise that you will deliver orally. All those things you write or say make up a set of words, and often a set of understanding, that nobody else would have come up with in exactly the same way. Hopefully you’re not so wildly off-beam that there’s a good reason why nobody else would ever have come up with anything similar, but each individual will express things, and to an extent understand them, differently. This will be true even of quite short pieces of material, such as a briefing note for a CEO or an article for a newsletter, and even more so of a long research or thought leadership-type report. You should still of course be led by the available evidence and by the need to argue the case for your organisation or beneficiaries. But on one basic level, policy is a creative exercise, and it’s easy to take for granted the amount of skill involved in doing it until you see someone do it really badly.
There’s a harder edge to this, though. Those written outputs in particular require strong skills: on a good day you can maybe bluster through something in a conversation, but there’s no hiding place on the page. That’s why the requirements for writing skills are so important, and stated so consistently in job descriptions. If you can’t write properly, it’s there in black and white for everyone to see. If you can’t put your ideas across clearly and accurately, or what you write is demonstrably wrong, it’s there in black and white for everyone to see. There will be more on language generally in a future article, but core writing skills are absolutely essential for policy work: what you write must be clear and precise, must advance your analysis rationally and with reference to evidence, and must persuade the reader as necessary. Again, it’s easy to overlook how difficult this is until you’ve seen it done really badly.
As with analytical skills, a degree course is the obvious but not the only place to pick these skills up. That’s not to say the skills needed for policy work are simply those of undergraduate essay technique: that might well be the core you build on, but it does require considerable adaptation. One major departure will be the ability to take different approaches for different audiences, which isn’t necessary in most academic courses: you will likely have comms colleagues who will be able to bring their own skills here, but you need to be capable enough with language that you can ensure the policy analysis is communicated accurately and comprehensibly to whoever needs to read it or hear it. Depending on how you approached your degree, you may also need to put policy arguments more directly and forcefully than would usually go down well in an academic essay. But even so, these changes may be a matter of fighting some instincts developed during your degree, while overall deploying the same skills to slightly different ends.
4. Then again…
I’d be glad of thoughts from colleagues about what other skills are needed for policy, or whether the core skills can be understood in different ways. One possible snag with the outline given above is that it risks entrenching some inequalities: particularly on the matter of appointing graduates, it risks privileging those who were born into circumstances that favoured their entry to university. What practices exist to identify the necessary skills in people who didn’t come up via that route, or help people to develop those skills during their careers? Leave a comment below or in the LinkedIn group, or find me on Twitter.