Throughout my working life to date I’ve endeavoured to support the purpose and strategic
direction of my employers.
I demonstrated this when I worked as a policy officer at the Department of the Prime Minister
and Cabinet. In my three years in this position I developed a highly nuanced understanding of
our work environment and where it sat within the federal government. I exercised this
understanding every fortnight, as I presented a fortnightly forum where current trends and
issues within the Department were discussed.
In preparing for this forum I looked at information from a variety of sources including media
services, departmental statistics and the results from focus groups and private polling, and I
conceptualised how they would impact on our work. I looked for trends in the data and gave
my impressions of the directions in which things were heading. I received consistently excellent
feedback for my work in this capacity.
Another large part of my work was preparing briefing notes for senior staff during the policy
review and implementation phases of our projects, and here too I took pains to harness
information, to think strategically, and to communicate what I thought and the reasons for it
effectively. For example, I was involved with the project that resulted in an important White
Paper on Counter-Terrorism. In order to prepare monthly briefing notes for senior management
I drew together reports and papers from all of Australia’s security agencies, state and federal, I
analysed it, and I used my experience to determine what was most relevant and then
highlighted it.
After my experience of working as a policy officer at the Department of the Prime Minister and
Cabinet I’m very confident in my ability to support the strategic direction of my employer, and
further, to play a role in shaping strategic thinking as well.”