Work experience: day 1

I have recently begun work experience with the financial department with the Department of Work and Pensions and have been amazed as to how useful I am finding it. This is essentially going to be a diary about what I have done and what I've got out of it. To start off with, my understanding of how the civil service ran was minimal. I had grasped the basics of ministers being responsible for certain sections of the economy in command of a vast team. As most of my understanding was based off of the TV series Yes Minister, I had little understanding of how the relationship between the ministers and civil servants communicated back and forth; sometimes the minister wants something done and wants to know how best to do it and other times the civil service wants something doing and needs to make it appealing to their minister. In addition I discovered more about its structure in general, with an in depth break down of the DWP as well as a look at the newer benefit reforms. Whilst a greater understanding of the civil service was very interesting, there were two main leanings that I took away from the first day. The first, of which, was the ability to interpret data and tackling the relevant problems from it. I learnt this because my first major task was to be given a comparison between the call centres performance, financially and quality wise, and it's targets. My task was to look at the few pages of data and find the major discrepancies and then, without any other information, figure out what was causing it and propose solutions. The first part of the task was very interesting as I had to get through the data very quickly working out both those that were not hitting the targets and those that were over performing, as the over achievers would likely be the cause of the underachievers. This taught me a lot about cause and effect, a principle I was already aware of from basic economics; a successful merger causes a rise in the stocks of that firm, a rise in price leads to a fall in demand and so on. Yet, I was extremely interested to see how, with a little bit of thought, a large amount of the figures could be explained by other figures and addressed thus; this kind of idea is partially what has drawn my fascination in economics, the idea of psychology and seemingly irrational behaviour can, with closer scrutiny, be somewhat predictable and then remedied. The remedies, themselves, I was asked to think up and this was where my basic classroom knowledge appeared to be of less use. (if lets say - I can't give actual examples as the information is classified - the expenditure on additional employee expenditure was under budget yet some departments were drastically exceeding their targets, with plenty of spare capacity, whilst another was under pressure, I'd suggest retraining members of the exceeding department to do the job of the under performing department. It's not that simple). Whilst my decisions would not be incorrect they were over ambitious (retraining takes time, resources and requires people to be off the phones in the pressurised department) and were only long term solutions. To make them work I'd need to provide a short term alternative to pick up the slack of the long term (in this case paying for overtime whilst the training is performed as well as providing additional information to make the change over smooth and prepare the FTEs for the change). I was well served enough to make a fair few unambitious suggestions, which were in use, yet they didn't help me learn the lesson of how what would theoretically be instant takes a fair bit of time for implementation. One of the best examples of them planning for such change was their allowance for discount caused by inflation (or time tax, as I coined it) when making large decisions; if something's going to cost you 1million now, to recoup the costs in three years time you need to save 1.3million over that time, for example. This made me realise that inputting a change to monetary policy, or another political decision, will take time to take effect, as the public needs to learn about it and then make the decision to change their routine around it. Everything takes a long time in big organisations, and the civil service is one of the biggest. This is something I learnt even more about on my second day!