Head of profession
- Grade
- G6
- Download
- Word document
Vision and strategic leadership
- Setting the vision and strategy for the profession across the department
- Collaborate with the wider department to ensure that the vision for the profession aligns to the wider needs of the department
- Creating a plan and roadmap to build and strengthen the professional capability and excellence
- Working across government and the sector to ensure a cohesive approach for the profession, creating opportunities for collaboration through existing networks or setting up new networks where they don’t exist
- Hold authority to ensure that specialists are able to contribute towards building the profession and participate in communities, backed by DDT Committee
- Raising the profile of the profession across the department
- Develop an attraction and retention strategy, to grow professional capability in the department
Expert practitioner
- Is the expert practitioner in their field, with a high level of knowledge and experience of current and new methodologies/strategies/technologies/techniques and a track record of delivery
- Retains an element of practice of their profession to keep their skills sharp and to work towards strategic departmental objectives
- For example, unblocking delivery, product strategies, content strategies, architectural designs and patterns, etc.
Community
- Developing professional communities to support our people to grow, establish professional standards and consistency, support rapid delivery through sharing and learning from one another
- Working cross-government and externally to build connections into professional communities
- Working with other Heads of Profession on cross-cutting objectives, and in related professions within their job family
Quality and standards
- Creating accessible knowledge, standards and practice, to set good conditions for people in their professions to work effectively, and ensuring they are well enforced through service assessments
- Being the guardian of quality and standards of the practitioners within the profession, owning and setting the principles and policies of the profession
- Lead by example in the application of standards
- Grow the assessor pool in the profession, to assure service delivery and build profession sustainability
People
- Building and growing a forward-thinking and diverse team within the profession
- Building the professional capability across the department
- Define the competency, professional practice, skills profile and expertise expectations at different grades across the profession
- Setting the approach for recruitment, onboarding, retention, graduate pipelines, diversification
- Developing the capability framework for professional development of people in their specialism, and tracking capability
Organisational delivery
- Establishing close relationships with all delivery teams to understand their needs and challenges, and to be able to identify areas of profession-related join-up*
- Advising and consulting for the senior leadership team on questions relating to the profession
- Providing consulting support for programmes with performance issues or where a particular specialism is lacking or causing delivery issues
- Feed up-to-date capability information into the workforce plan
- Making evidenced based decisions on the tools, platforms, services and content that best supports professions across the department
* Responsibility for delivery or a role in making business decisions is not explicitly included. This may differ by profession.