I was working in IT Support at the Department for Education when I applied for the Home Office role. It all sounded very new and exciting because they were recruiting for junior Business Analysts to join a brand-new Digital Hub in Sheffield. I applied more in hope than expectation. I passed the BCS (British Computer Society) qualification 10 years ago, but I had never actually been a proper Business Analyst.
I didn’t have the best of starts, as I had a severe dose of chicken pox in my first week! However, once I started, I wasn’t disappointed. The culture in the Digital Hub was very laid back but with incredibly passionate people committed to delivering first rate digital services. I learned a lot in a very short time from other Business Analysts and even more from working closely with other professions – developers, testers, user researchers etc. One of the joys of working in an agile team is that you don’t work alone or in silos. Other team members muck in.
I now work in a team which develops application programming interfaces (APIs) to access data held by other government departments so that as an organisation we don’t ask people for information that the wider government already holds. It’s a great team to be a part of and I especially enjoy the pure analysis work involved in understanding the data held by other departments and working out how we can best use it to support the services we deliver.
In my experience, the Home Office is a great place to work. You are well supported in terms of training and development and there are opportunities to progress.
