The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) plays a vital role at the heart of UK life. The wide-ranging work we do includes safeguarding the natural environment, supporting the UK’s world-leading food and farming industries, sustaining a thriving rural economy and leading the engineering of the nation’s defences against natural threats and hazards. Join Defra and you will be part of a department that is responsible for the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe.

Designing and delivering communication strategies for EU Exit Projects at a crucial time in the nation’s history, you will:

• Work with cross government departments and policy teams to devise effective ways to talk to the target audience, coming up with innovative ways to explain complex policy areas in a clear and engaging way. You will be confident in your ability to lead the team in delivering the four key areas of the communications planning process: Insight, Ideas, Implementation and Impact.
• Have the capacity to think critically about the complex challenges that the Government will face in the coming months, coming up with pre-emptive communications strategies and putting risk management solutions in place.
• Identify and build audiences, gathering information and insight about these groups, and adapting your strategies to achieve the best results for each audience.
• Analyse the effectiveness of your campaigns, sharing this knowledge with colleagues in order to deliver a culture of continuous improvement.
• Support the wider communications team with their projects, offering expert advice to senior colleagues. 

This is an excellent opportunity to develop your portfolio of work across the types of challenges that make headlines. You will therefore be a natural leader, with outstanding partnership skills and the capacity to forge relationships with key stakeholders, policy teams and other government departments. You will have considerable experience of delivering comprehensive communications advice, and shaping well-considered strategic communications plans. As such, you might possibly come from a marketing, press office or policy background, and you will have fantastic writing and analytical skills. With good risk management awareness, you will be meticulously organised, and you will happily juggle multiple priorities at pace. Flexibility with location is available, however, we would expect you to be in the London office at least 2 days a week

We aim to support the professional and personal wellbeing of everyone in Defra. Our benefits include generous annual leave, a contributory pension, staff bonuses and recognition, salary sacrifice benefit options, and an employee discount scheme. We also offer flexible working and a variety of learning and development opportunities.