Department for Culture, Media and Sport

• Location
  London, United Kingdom
• Sector
  Non Profit
• Experience
  Early Career / Mid Career

Position description

The Cultural Diplomacy team aims to support and deploy DCMS’ soft power assets to deliver the Government’s economic and foreign policy aims, as well as supporting the UK’s role as an international ‘force for good’. 

The UK’s strength in culture makes it a good foundation for building mutually beneficial relationships between the UK and other countries and their governments, as well as promoting our values on the international stage. 

The team’s responsibilities include: delivering DCMS’s arts and cultural international priorities; delivering the G20 and G7 Culture tracks; managing bilateral relationships with priority countries and driving forward DCMS’s interests in trade and export policy within our sectors.

This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to a great team that works across DCMS sectors in the arts and cultural space. Our team provides opportunities to work closely with senior officials and ministers and across Whitehall to help deliver DCMS’s international goals. 

Job description

This role leads a team responsible for helping to deliver the UK’s wider foreign policy objectives within arts and culture, and also helps to contribute  towards the UK’s economic growth by encouraging international trade and export within these sectors. 

The role includes representing the UK at multilateral fora including the G20 Culture track, and managing the relationship between DCMS and major stakeholders including the British Council and the international team at Arts Council England.

We are looking for an effective team leader, with excellent people, management, communication, policy and strategic skills. You’ll need an eye for detail, and also be very comfortable seeing the bigger picture across a range of policy areas to enable prioritisation and continual progress to long term goals.

We require an individual who can work collegiately with wider DCMS teams, to identify/progress shared areas of interest in the most efficient way possible.

As a team leader, you will set the direction in managing a small, high-performing team, delivering short and longer term priorities. A keen interest in developing yourself and your team will be key. 

Key to this will be developing excellent relationships with a diverse range of organisations and high profile individuals, other Government departments, and wider DCMS sector teams, and working closely with them to ensure you fully understand their issues, perspectives and ways of working, and can feed these into policy development. 

Person specification

The ideal candidate would have the following key skills and experience:

Essential Requirements:

• Ability to work at pace and lead teams in a pressurised and changing environment.
• Ability to develop and maintain expertise in their brief, and to provide high quality advice to senior leaders
• Ability to maintain effective, long-term relationships with other organisations and wider stakeholders 
• Ability to prioritise between multiple workstreams and drive towards long term goals, whilst achieving short term ambitions 
• Experience of leading and motivating a team

Desirable Skills:

• Experience working as part of teams to deliver policy successes
• Developing and maintaining project management products and approaches for a wider team
• Experience organising international-facing events for visiting Ministers and government officials or equivalent
• Evidence of an interest in international affairs and continued professional development to develop understanding of this area
• Experience in arts or international policy within government or as part of a cultural organisation e.g. working with multilateral organisations is not essential but highly desirable

We are offering applicants to join a virtual information session on Wednesday 3rd January 3-4pm hosted by the vacancy holder - Emily Driscoll, Head of Cultural Diplomacy.

The session will be an opportunity to hear more about the role, the team and wider directorate and the department. It will also be an opportunity for you to ask any questions.

Please register your interest here and you will be sent an invitation. 

Behaviors

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

• Making Effective Decisions
• Communicating and Influencing
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Delivering at Pace

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