Senior External Affairs Manager

Salary: £37,428 - £41,173

Location: Bristol : Nottingham

We are looking for a Senior External Affairs Manager to join our new team of external affairs experts working with stakeholders to deliver DVSA’s 5 year strategy to help you stay safe on Britain’s roads. We would love to hear from you!

In your role as Senior External Affairs Manager, you will be responsible for implementing a vital component of DVSA’s 5-year strategy, by strengthening relationships and partnerships with traditional stakeholders and building new ones with non-traditional organisations and individuals, to help inform, educate and advise road users.

Responsibilities will include:

As our Senior External Affairs Manager, key responsibilities of your role will include:

• Being accountable for driving improved business outcomes by the design, development, implementation and evaluation of DVSA’s external affairs engagement plan. You will ensure DVSA works closely and collaboratively with priority stakeholders to develop advocacy, and through a true partnership approach deliver positive road safety outcomes
• Fully understanding who DVSA’s customers and stakeholders are, their relationship with the agency and their needs, adapting and updating the external affairs engagement plan accordingly
• Building relationships with DVSA’s CEO, directors and senior managers to negotiate delivery of the engagement plan. You will own the external affairs engagement plan across all of DVSA’s products and services and play a key part in implementation of DVSA’s communication and engagement strategy
• Ensuring that contact with DVSA’s stakeholders is optimised to enable DVSA to reach the right audiences, particularly new, non-traditional ones. You will be responsible for ensuring senior policy and operational managers, amongst others, are suitably equipped and briefed for dealing with customers and stakeholders
• Reviewing and owning the process of interpreting external customer and stakeholder feedback and providing that insight back into the business
• Being the external affairs expert for DVSA and developing key relationships as a Business Partner to DVSA’s Service Development Groups (SDDs) and Corporate Senior Leaders

About you

To thrive in this role it is essential that you have previously worked in a senior customer or customer facing role, e.g. external affairs manager, external relations manager, account manager, account director, business development, operational manager, communications manager, commercial or marketing manager.

You will use your experience of interpreting user needs and feeding back to business owners, to enable you to take responsibility for developing and owning the key strategic relationships with external customers and stakeholders at a corporate level, ensuring their views and feedback are captured to inform DVSA’s work. Excellent interpersonal skills and strong written and oral communication skills at all levels are therefore paramount.
 

Closing date: 28 May 2019