Department for Business, Innovation & Skills
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) is committed to making a difference by supporting sustained growth and higher skills across the economy. To compete in a global economy and create the jobs of the future, Britain requires a regulatory environment that encourages enterprise, skilled people, innovation, and world-class science and research.
More specifically, BIS will:
- Ensure new businesses and economic opportunities are more evenly shared, supporting growth and a low-carbon economy;
- Enable local authorities and businesses to determine the development strategies for their local area, in ways that support national economic growth and help to rebalance the economy;
- Secure the future of the universal postal service and create a sustainable future for Royal Mail and the Post Office network;
- Create a dynamic and efficient skills system with informed, empowered learners and employers served by responsive colleges and other providers in their areas
- Establish a higher education, science and research framework that promotes world class competitiveness in teaching and research. Ensure progression, fair access and better quality for students. Strengthen links between universities and industries and support innovation and technology development
- Help small and medium sized businesses start and thrive through better business support, improved access to finance and stronger competition with fewer market barriers to entry, creating a more entrepreneurial culture
- Promote open and fair global markets, improve UK Trade & Investment’s focus on generating high value inward investment, and strengthen the capability of UK exporters
- Create a business environment that supports long-term investment and sustainable growth, reducing regulation, creating more flexible labour markets, reforming corporate governance and ensuring that intellectual property laws promote commercial innovation
- Strengthen consumer protections, especially for the most vulnerable, and promote more responsible corporate and consumer behaviour through greater transparency and by harnessing the insights from behavioural economics and social psychology
Operational Research at BIS
There are currently 16 OR analysts in BIS. The analysts are distributed amongst several groups within the department: Business and Skills, Economics, Strategy and Better Regulation and Knowledge and Innovation. This distribution is reflected in the variety of projects undertaken. These include:
- Producing forecasts of the costs of student support and fee income to English institutions.
- Leading and managing a project to develop Performance Indicators for the Higher Education Programme and to develop a Knowledge Management system for Higher Education Directorate.
- Simulation modelling of student loan repayments to estimate the Resource Accounting and Budgeting charge for student loans.
- Informing Organisation Design decisions with strategic analysis.
- Workforce modelling to inform human resoruces policies
- Producing models to forecast the income from the Department’s portfolio of launch investments contracts.
- Exploring the feasibility of proposed Further Education (FE) loans.
- Modelling the costs and savings from the department’s shared services programme.
- Resource allocation and activity prioritisation
- Systems modelling of the skills strategy.
- Forecasting budget volatility and how these risks may impact on departmental spend at an aggregated level.
Methods in recent use include forecasting, multi-criteria decision analysis, simulation, delivery chain mapping, systems modelling, survey analysis, process mapping and time series analysis, as well as general statistical analysis and evaluation.
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What to Expect
The majority of OR analysts are based in central London although the department also has analysts working in Sheffield. We work alongside economists, statisticians, social researchers as well as policy specialists.
The BIS OR team will actively support your professional and career development, shaping a programme of training to fit your individual aspirations, as well as the needs of the job.
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