Senior External Affairs Manager

Senior External Affairs Manager

Ref: 342816

Salary: £40,808

Location: Bristol, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nottingham, Swansea

Closing date: 11:55pm on Friday 29 March 2024.

Job summary

• Do you have experience leading External Affairs and engagement with senior stakeholder groups?
• Are you an experienced and confident stakeholder engagement professional?
• Do you want to play an exciting part in keeping Britain moving, safely and sustainably?

If so, we would love to hear from you!

Job description

We recently set out our vision to 2030, which explains the challenges we face and how our important work with partners can help to:

• Make roads safer.
• Improve services for our customers.
• Make road transport greener and healthier.
• Harness the potential of technology and data.
• Grow and level up the economy.

You’ll be responsible for bringing our partnership principles to life. They are:

• Better together - we know that we cannot do everything on our own, that two perspectives are better than one, and that a diversity of views enriches every decision.
• Shared understanding – being open about the social, technological, environmental and political landscape to give everyone realistic expectations.
• Trusted decisions – using evidence and good quality intelligence and data to improve every decision – sharing reliable data to reduce the room for disagreement.
• Shared goals - we want businesses to succeed - we want to agree on a vision and understand what our customers need and want, so we can all help each other consistently.
• Better outcomes – we want to improve together, and make decisions informed by each other, leading to sustainable outcomes which we can keep improving.

You'll help us to do this by developing and owning the key strategic relationships with external customers and stakeholders, ensuring their views and feedback are captured to inform DVSA’s work.

You will support policy officials and subject matter experts to ensure meaningful, fair, stakeholder engagement is at the start and heart of our work. You’ll help plan and deliver timely and transparent high quality stakeholder engagement, supporting colleagues to develop their engagement skills to enhance and improve relationships with external organisations.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Leading on External Affairs for DVSA, supporting policy officials to develop better relationships with DVSA’s customers and stakeholders.
• Enable establishment and development of new relationships and partnerships with organisations who are non-traditional DVSA stakeholders.
• Formulate strategic communications and engagement plans with DVSA’s External Communications teams to educate, advise and guide road users.
• Proactively identify engagement activities or events and make recommendations for DVSA CEO, Director and senior management attendance.
• Oversee and own stakeholder mapping for DVSA and provide advice and guidance to projects on stakeholder engagement strategy and activity.

Additional Information

This role can be based in Swansea, Nottingham, Bristol, or Newcastle,(Chadderton/Garrett’s Green), your presence at one of these locations will form part of the working arrangements agreed with you. We operate a hybrid working model giving you greater flexibility about where and when you work.

A minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace, although requirements to attend other locations for official business, or carry out detached duty in another DfT workplace, will also count towards this level of attendance. DfT workplace attendance expectations were updated in recruitment campaigns on 17 November 2023. Occasional travel to other DfT offices will be required.

There will be occasional travel required with this role to other DVSA locations, including overnight stays.

Whilst we welcome applications from those looking to work with us on a part time basis, there is a business requirement, for the successful candidate to be able to work at least 30 hours per week.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact: Abigail Holland, Abigail.holland@dvsa.gov.uk

Recruitment team: dftrecruitment.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk