A uniquely interesting place to work on digital – come join us

The FCO’s Digital Strategy, published last December, set an ambitious vision: a Foreign Office that makes full use of digital tools to enhance foreign policy formulation; and a Foreign Office that provides its consular services digitally by default, delivering more effective services and allowing us to spend more time on the most vulnerable Brits abroad.

This is a unique challenge. The Foreign Office operates across the world in countries that have remarkably different cultures, levels of development and online connectivity. It operates in multiple languages. And it has a diverse range of staff working across that network, from British career diplomats to staff employed locally by our Embassies.

But it is also uniquely fascinating. Our mission is promoting UK growth, defending our security and protecting British nationals overseas and the issues we work on are some of the most interesting dealt with by government. Our work is being fundamentally impacted by digital. Recent international developments in Turkey, Brazil, Egypt and elsewhere have all seen social media play a major role. Consular crisis response is being enhanced – and sometimes made more complicated – by digital and social media. The Digital Strategy showed how digital tools had already contributed to every aspect of foreign policy work.

With that in mind, we’re now beginning to recruit for a small Digital Transformation Unit to make sure we remain a world leading Foreign Ministry in how we harness the information age. These roles include:

• Digital training and upskilling officers – defining and putting in place the new training, guidance and support FCO staff will need to use digital tools in policy and service delivery.
• Digital policy officer – looking more concretely at how the FCO can make use of digital tools to improve foreign policy work across the board.
• Digital proposition/portfolio managers – driving and defining how the FCO will move its services to digital and also helping drive improvements in our internal software and systems.

The first two roles in this list are already being advertised on the Civil Service Jobs Gateway for existing UK civil servants, while we’re also recruiting for a Digital Support Officer to support this team (all slots have an application deadline of 15 July).

It’s only a handful roles we’ll be advertising. But they will offer the right people an opportunity to make a real difference to foreign policy and service delivery. We hope you’ll consider joining our team.