Five tips for your first public policy job (and five tips for your managers)

Update, June 2021: We first wrote this piece in 2019. Since then we’ve heard some more good advice, and the world of work changed profoundly, with a lot more happening from home. So we’ve updated the piece slightly, and incorporated input from people at the start of their own policy careers.

The academic year is over, and lots of people are starting summer internships or their first jobs in public policy (or they are hoping to soon). This can be a bumpy adjustment as your visions of changing the world meets the realities of work life. Good managers and colleagues can make the start of your career exciting. But busy managers often treat interns and junior staff as an after-thought, leading to missed opportunities all around.

Here are some lessons we have learned (often the hard way!) that we hope will help you succeed as you’re starting out.

Advice to people at the beginning of their policy careers

1. Play your position

If you’re a new grad, you’re likely excited to jump into the thorniest issues and share all your skills at every turn. That’s great! But chances are you weren’t hired to be a pre-eminent specialist. Get the lay of the land before you break out hot takes on how to handle hard problems.

This very much does not mean that junior staff should be seen and not heard. But venue matters. Telling your manager your great idea well before you head into a meeting with your mutual boss is wise. Springing it on her for the first time in front of her boss is not.

Try to bring confidence but not ego — speak up when you’ve got something to add, but don’t be crushed if your idea is eviscerated. This also extends to having your written work edited (often to the extent you can’t recognize it). That can be a shock if you are coming from an academic environment. Learn from the changes you see, and don’t be afraid to ask for feedback.

Playing your position is also about thinking about your team or organization’s role in shaping public policy. It takes contributions from political, public service, stakeholders, advocates, researchers and residents to make good public policy happen. Wherever you fit in, you’ll do better work if you assume other voices have an important role to play and know things that you don’t.

2. Build your network

Your peers and near-peers are your best resource in a new job. Not only can you puzzle through problems together, you will be each other’s most important allies throughout your careers. Be generous with each other. Help each other look good.

And it’s helpful to keep in touch with colleagues and new friends once the internship/summer job is over. It’s quite easy to have a great experience, but then get busy with life and other things and forget to maintain those relationships. You may need advice in the future or want to chat through a policy problem at a different job and they just so happen to be an expert in that issue.

Don’t be afraid to network with people senior to you. Internships in particular are a time when you have social license to be pretty shameless in asking for advice from very senior people. What was their career path? How did they get where they are? What advice do they have for you?

Remote work has changed how you build your network. Our advice is to get out of your comfort zone and embrace the Zoom one-on-ones. Before it might have felt a bit more natural to bump into someone in the office and start a conversation, now it may feel slightly more daunting to send the cold LinkedIn Message or email people within the company you haven’t met yet. Embrace the weirdness of that cold communication. The worst that can happen is someone doesn’t respond back. Also, if you ask for someone’s time, come prepared with questions.

And, this should go without saying: be respectful to every single person in your office — colleagues, IT staff, the person who delivers the mail, bosses, admin staff, security. As a colleague put it to us, just treat every person like they are slightly more senior than you. This includes over email.

3. Don’t be a hero

Naturally you want to show everyone that you’re a hard worker and committed to the team. But don’t pull crazy hours just to prove that to everyone.

Your biggest strength as a new employee will be knowing how and when to ask for help. It would be totally unreasonable for your new workplace to expect you to know everything from the start — or even most things.

But do ask for help in the right way. It’s much better to (quickly) try to guess how you could solve problem, and present your question that way, rather than just throwing your hands up in panic. “I have to ask another department for input. I think I should look up a policy advisor there and ask her who we should get to review this. Is that right? How would you do this?”

It should be pretty rare for you to have to start from a blank page. Ask for examples and precedents of the types of work you’re doing.

4. Pay attention to detail

For every project someone needs to care the most about little details. Assume that person is you. But attention to detail might not come naturally. Give yourself tools, make a quality control checklist, whatever it takes so that your supervisor knows that if you’ve worked on something, it’s going to be clean.

We almost called this post “So you’ve started a job in p̵u̵b̵l̵i̵c̵ ̵p̵o̵l̵i̵c̵y̵ writing emails.” Congrats! This is your life now. There are plenty resources out there on clear written communication. Our top two tips here are (1) to make sure it’s obvious what you’re asking the recipient to do in every email you send, and (2) to always be courteous.

5. Reflect on what kind of work you want to do

Careers are long. It’s unlikely that your first policy gig will be your perfect forever job (if those exist). Public policy is a “big tent” profession with a lot of different pathways that offer very different ways to contribute. Use this job (and every job you take) to learn about where you want to end up.

One part of this is getting a better understanding of the kinds of roles that are out there. Ask to see an organizational chart and figure out what everyone in your department or organization does. Beyond their titles, try to learn what their actual tasks are, how they spend their days. See if there are opportunities to shadow different people. If your manager asks what’s on your wish list for tasks to do during your internship/contract, have an answer.

Another aspect is to think about the roles that let you do your best work. Think about how you want to spend your days. Do you want to be a specialist or a generalist? Are you more comfortable doing advocacy or analysis? If you’re passionate about climate change, but you can’t handle quiet days spent alone with excel, you probably shouldn’t be aiming to be a data analyst for an environmental agency.

And it’s important to reflect on not only on what kind of work you want to do, but also where you want to do it. A policy job in a non-profit is different to what that job would look like in government or in the private sector and working in a large organization is different than a small one. Reflect on the company culture/work environment and what fits best with how you like to work.

Advice to managers of people at the beginning of their policy careers

Great managers can give a long-lasting boost to someone’s career, and lousy ones can chase people out of the profession altogether. Here’s some things to aim towards:

1. Have a plan

Avoid make-work projects or only giving junior staff odd-jobs like reorganizing the shared drive or compiling lists of stakeholders. Make sure they have at least one project they can own and see through to completion.

Ask what they want out of the position, and if there are any specific tasks they want to do. Especially for interns and other time-limited employees, work with them to figure out a bucket list, then work to get them as many of those experiences as you can. Think of it as reverse-engineering how they’ll describe this job on their resume.

Support their professional development by including them in important meetings, even just to take notes. In remote and hybrid work environments this takes more conscious effort than asking someone to pop into the boardroom for a meeting, but it matters even more without the day-to-day exposure of the office environment. Before they arrive, look into whether there are any courses or events they can attend and make sure they know they really can (should!) take the time to go. These don’t need to be costly. Ask them to give you a list of departments or organizations that are interesting to them, and make introductions to people working there.

2. Give concrete, compassionate feedback

You’re not doing anybody any good if you don’t tell them how to improve. Show how their work contributes. If their work doesn’t hit the mark, walk them through what parts need to change. Be specific. But there’s no need to be a jerk about it. Make it clear that they are expected to be learning on the job, especially at this point in their career.

Where you can, model what it is like to seek and learn from feedback. Ask your intern/new staff person what they thought was effective and what can be improved about your own work or other work from more seasoned colleagues. Taking feedback well is not a personality trait, it’s a skill that can be learned. Show them how.

3. Make time

Schedule one-on-ones so you can hear about how things are going, and don’t wait for your new staff person to come to you proactively. If you can’t make the time, set them up with a mentor or supervisor who can.

You’ll also need to make time in the future. Junior staff are likely to need references for years after you hire them. For earlier-career workers and interns, this can include writing letters of reference for graduate school and leadership programs. Help yourself out by keeping some quick notes about the junior staff, their strengths/weakness and the work they’re doing for you.

If you aren’t in a position to renew their contract, you can offer to review their resume and cover letter for their next jobs, and try to connect them with opportunities where they would be a good fit.

4. Spell things out

Every office has shorthand, acronyms, and jargon, and it’s possible you don’t notice how much your day-to-day sounds like alphabet soup. Take time to spell things out. This includes walking your new staff through org-charts to understand who does what. In a remote/hybrid setup, this could mean an extra pre-/post- call to offer context where you don’t have the chance to explain on the walk back to the office.

Junior staff are likely to be embarrassed if they don’t understand something. When giving directions, stop often and ask what parts don’t make sense. Give examples where possible.

Consider telling early-career staff how much time a task should take, and be generous in your estimate. This helps them from spending far too long on everything because they’re aiming for perfection.

If you work for a really large employer, make sure someone physically shows your new hires around for the first few days. This applies in a virtual setting as well, in terms of navigating the systems your team relies on to do their work.

5. Champion and protect

A lot of dark stuff can happen at work. Racism, toxicity, sexual harassment. Junior staff are especially vulnerable to all of these things, because they are generally keen to impress and be uncomplaining, because they’re likely to be on contract and afraid of rocking the boat, and because they may not have much experience with what’s normal to expect in a workplace.

All of this is likely to be compounded for racialized, LGBTQI+, Indigenous, newcomer, and female staff. Some new workers will be in settings where they don’t feel welcome and don’t see many people who look like them or share their experiences.

Make sure your new workers are aware of all their rights and entitlements. This means more than just handing them a code of conduct and an HR contact. Tell them they’re entitled to respect, to be safe, and to be taken seriously, and make sure you and everyone around you does both. Make sure they know the paths to getting help and backup if they need it. If you see something, intervene.

Ask how they’re experiencing the workplace. If they have a concern, avoid getting defensive or explaining how it isn’t really a problem. Listen first. In a remote setting this means scheduling time for check-ins, apart from project work.

And also make it your job to give your early-career staff the opportunity to shine. Whenever they do a good piece of work or research, take every opportunity to tell people about it — highlight their work or acknowledge their ideas in meetings and with your own bosses.