Research and Development Support Officer

This is an exciting time to join our Occupational Psychology and Psychometric Services (OPPS) team - part of the Recruitment Directorate in OneGov in Cabinet Office - as we seek to update and expand our services.

You will be joining a high performing multi-disciplinary team of occupational psychologists, psychometricians and digital experts who use evidence-based practice to put the client and user at the heart of what they do. We are a team that embraces innovation to deliver better results, improved efficiency and added value, with a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion. The ideal candidate for this role would be someone with a background in social sciences (for example psychology) or numerate degrees (such as maths or statistics) who has experience of taking part in research projects and understands quantitative data collection. Although these are not part of key deliverables for the role, depending on the right candidate, there will be opportunities to develop capability in statistics and data analysis. The role will provide a great opportunity to build experience in real world application of psychometrics and occupational psychology and to be supported by a range of experienced, senior members of the team with relevant backgrounds.

If you are passionate about applying psychology and psychometrics in the workplace to really add value across a wide and varied agenda, then we really want to hear from you!

The role

The Research and Development Support Officer will contribute to the smooth running of our service and will play a key role in assisting the development of new psychometric tools as well as the research required for the maintenance of our existing psychometric suite. The job holder will be responsible for managing and maintaining our shared mailbox where we receive a wide range of enquiries from different stakeholders. The job holder will also develop expertise in managing the testing platform and be responsible for assigning tests to test takers as part of trials run by Lead Psychometricians.

The R&D Support Officer will work very closely with a multi-disciplinary team operating an agile project management approach, so will work in an agile way to assist the Psychometricians, Occupational Psychologists, and digital colleagues.

We have regular meetings located in our offices nationally and travel at regular intervals within the UK will be a requirement of the role.

Responsibilities

• Managing the testing platform for the purposes of new assessment implementation
• Setting up and managing testing access and tailoring products and services for ad hoc and bespoke assessment needs
• Customer relations for gathering systematic feedback on their experience using the service
• Providing research support working with the team’s occupational psychologists and psychometricians by preparing and building research materials, communicating with participants
• Tracking test usage and spend of customers using the service, providing data exports to the team to assist with R&D activities, technical evaluations, data analysis and data insights
• Managing the service’s support mailbox, including handling all enquiries incoming from stakeholders
• Providing secretariat duties for online test and assessment meetings

Person specification

Key skills and experience

• Experience working in a testing environment, particularly in recruitment (or the L&D space) or
• Experience working in (academic) research projects relevant to scale development and/or validation, or
• Experience working in Research and Development and the implementation of new psychometric tools supporting the technical team;

• Demonstrate the ability to work independently on various stages in a research project, examples could include survey/scale development and deployment, participants recruitment and communication, data collection and analysis;
• Demonstrate experience using a survey platform;
• Demonstrate experience in communications with various stakeholders;
• Demonstrate experience in report writing and disseminating findings;
• The ability to organise and manage own workload;
• Strong communication skills both verbal and written; with both customers and team members;
• The ability to work quickly. accurately, and with strong attention to detail;
• Demonstrate capacity to quickly acquire and apply new skills

Additional Information

A minimum 60% of your working time should be spent at your principal workplace. Although requirements to attend other locations for official business will also count towards this level of attendance.

Qualifications

Minimum degree educated with a strong research component as part of their program where the candidate has engaged with primary research including study design and data collection

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Working Together
• Developing Self and Others
• Managing a Quality Service

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Demonstrate the ability to work independently on various stages in a research project, examples could include survey/scale development and deployment, participants recruitment and communication, data collection and analysis
• Demonstrate experience using a survey platform

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £30,768, Cabinet Office contributes £8,913 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

• Learning and development tailored to your role.
• An environment with flexible working options.
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity.
• A Civil Service Pension which provides an attractive pension, benefits for dependants and employer contributions of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by one day per year up to a maximum of 30.