Head of data engineering

Grade
SCS1
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Vision and strategic leadership

  • Setting the vision and strategy for the profession across the department.
  • Collaborating with the wider Department to ensure that the vision for the profession aligns with the wider needs of the department.
  • Creating a plan and roadmap to build and strengthen professional capability and excellence.
  • Working across government and the sector to ensure a cohesive approach to the specialism, creating opportunities for collaboration through existing networks – or setting up new networks where they don’t exist.
  • Holding authority to ensure that specialists can contribute towards building the profession and participate in communities, backed by DDaT Committee.
  • Raising the profile of the profession across the department.
  • Developing an attraction and retention strategy to grow professional capability in the department.

Expert practitioner

  • Acting as the expert practitioner in their field with a high level of knowledge of current and new methodologies, strategies, technologies, techniques, and a track record of delivery.
  • Retaining 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 standards and consistency, and 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 in related professions within their job family.

Quality and standards

  • Creating accessible knowledge, standards, and practices 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 and the principles and policies of the profession.
  • Leading by example in the application of standards.
  • Growing 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 professional capability across the department.
  • Defining 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, and developing the framework for the professional development of people in their specialism.
  • Developing the 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 Data Engineering alignment.
  • Advising and consulting for the senior management 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.
  • Feeding up-to-date capability information into the workforce plan.
  • Making evidence-based decisions on the best tools, platforms, services, and content which support the professions across the department.