Operational Data and Insight Manager

Job summary

Census 2031 represents our most ambitious data collection project yet – a once-in-a-decade opportunity to capture a complete picture of everyone living in England and Wales. Building on the digital success of 2021, we're pioneering new ways to reach every household and community, ensuring no one is left uncounted. This vital work will provide the foundation for policy decisions, resource allocation, and community planning for the next decade.

Your work will support delivery of this transformational project that will shape how we understand and support our nation's future. You’ll be part of a team that ensures everyone is counted—and every voice is heard. We're building a culture that values collaboration, fresh thinking, and respect for diverse expertise. Whether you're a seasoned professional or bringing new perspectives, you'll be part of a team that welcomes bold ideas, works transparently, and thrives on solving complex challenges together.

This role sits within Census Service Delivery & Operations division and plays a key part in shaping the delivery and performance of Census services.

As an operational support manager you will work with a diverse range of stakeholders, coordinating activities across multiple workstreams to ensure successful delivery. You will be responsible for helping to establish policies and procedures, ensuring that working practices including issue management are monitored and documented, making use of available information to inform work and drive performance and improvements to systems / services, and gather metrics for reporting and future improvement opportunities.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution, and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime, and migration.

Job description

As part of our Operational Management function, you'll play a key role in supporting the design, development and management of Census operational dashboards, management information, and reporting solutions. You'll help deliver timely, accurate and meaningful insights that support effective service delivery, operational performance, and informed decision-making across the organisation.

Working closely with operational teams, service managers and senior stakeholders, you'll analyse complex data and translate it into clear, actionable intelligence. You'll contribute to the development of advanced dashboards, reporting frameworks and analytical tools, ensuring stakeholders have access to the information they need to improve performance and support strategic planning.

You'll be part of a collaborative Business Intelligence team focused on continuous improvement and operational excellence. Working alongside the Business Intelligence Manager and multidisciplinary colleagues, you'll help monitor and enhance operational services and systems, using data-driven insights to identify opportunities, drive efficiencies and ensure processes remain effective, relevant and fit for purpose.

Key Responsibilities:

• Interpret Census operational data and apply Business Intelligence (BI) approaches to support service delivery, operational decision-making and continuous improvement, including through dashboards and data sets.
• Collate, transform and model data from multiple sources, seeking opportunities to innovate and improve the quality and efficiency of analysis and reporting.
• Produce, test and quality assure accurate and timely management information and BI products, to report Census operational and service performance, ensuring compliance with relevant policies, data governance and data protection requirements.
• Ask appropriate questions of the data and highlight trends, emerging issues and risks to support informed decision-making and intervention activity.
• Work as part of the BI function, establishing effective working relationships with Census service owners and operational stakeholders, contributing to regular discussions to understand emerging data and reporting needs.
• Undertake analysis to support the ongoing evaluation of the Census operation and provide analytical support to other Census services undertaking evaluation activity.
• Summarise and present analytical findings and management information clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Proven experience communicating and building relationships across teams to deliver excellent service, quality and performance.
• Ability to think analytically, using trends and insights from data to support decision-making and forecasts.
• Leads the development, design and commissioning of meaningful management information and dashboards (data outputs) to provide data and insights at pace to support service delivery and operational standards.
• Assures how data is used to drive decision making in a consistent way across the organisation.
• Is confident in weighing up competing data sets to ensure sound decision making across the organisation.

Behaviours

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

• Delivering at Pace
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Managing a Quality Service

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £34,587, Office for National Statistics contributes £10,019 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.

Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that our careers site will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working culture.

Inclusion & Accessibility

At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.

As part of our application process, you will be prompted to provide details of any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process that you need. If you would like to discuss any reasonable adjustments before applying, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance.

If you would like an accessible version of any of the attachments or recruitment documents below or linked to in this advert, please contact the recruitment team who will be happy to assist.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.

Visa Sponsorship:

ONS is unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role. Applicants must have a valid right to work in the UK when employment commences. If you are currently in the UK on a time-limited visa, it must have at least 18 months remaining at the point of application.

Right to Work and Nationality Requirements:

To work at ONS, applicants must meet the Civil Service nationality requirements, satisfy UK right to work requirements and, where applicable, meet the relevant security clearance requirements.

Security Clearance:

For ONS the requirement for SC clearance is to have been present in the UK for 3 consecutive years immediately prior to applying and the department will consider eligibility by exception on a case-by-case basis. You will be asked to provide information regarding your UK residency during your application, and failure to provide this will result in your application being rejected.

If you are unsure that you meet the eligibility above, please read the information available on Gov.uk on this linkor contact the recruitment email on the advert before applying to discuss, as failure to meet the residency requirements will result in your security clearance application being rejected and any offer of employment being withdrawn.

At the point of SC application, you will need to provide or give access to the following evidence:

• Departmental or company records (personnel files, staff reports, sick leave reports and security records)
• UK criminal records covering both spent and unspent criminal records
• Your credit and financial history with a credit reference agency
• Security Services records

Applicant Support

Number of Stages: 2 stage process

Stage 1: Application

Stage 2: Interview

Stage 1 – Application

The assessment process at the application stage will be based on your work history, skills, experience and personal statement. It is important that your application is tailored to highlight the skills, knowledge, and experience relevant to the role.

A personal statement is required at application stage, the maximum word count allowed is 1250, which should not be exceeded. You should provide evidence for each essential skill criterion listed in the person specification. As these criteria are scored, it is advisable to give clear examples for each one, including the impact of your actions, ideally utilising the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result).

Please note that Success Profiles Behaviour examples are not required at this stage of the application process.

When a high volume of applications are received, the sift pass mark may be adjusted. Candidates will be invited to interview based on their merit order, with those achieving the highest scores being prioritised. Applicants who score below the adjusted pass mark but still pass will be placed on hold and may be invited to interview at a later date.

Stage 2 – Interview

If invited to interview, you will be assessed using techniques aligned with the Civil Service Success Profiles framework, covering all behaviours listed in the job advert and any required technical skills.

Interviews will be conducted in person at our Titchfield site:

Office for National Statistics

Segensworth Road

Titchfield

Fareham

PO15 5RR

Our main locations are Newport (South Wales) and Titchfield.

A reserve list may be held for a period up to 12 months from which further appointments may be made.

Important Dates:

The Sift will be conducted from Tuesday 13th October

Interviews will be conducted from Monday 2nd November

Dates are subject to change.

For the full terms and conditions of the post, please see attachment.

Please note that all campaigns may be subject to withdrawal at any stage if the internal resource position changes.

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a basic (or equivalent) criminal record check.Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window).People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window).The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria.The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.

Diversity and Inclusion

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see theCivil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

Apply and further information

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.Once this job has closed, the job advert will no longer be available. You may want to save a copy for your records.

Contact point for applicants

Job contact :

• Name : Recruitmentoperations@ons.gov.uk
• Email : Recruitmentoperations@ons.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : About.You@ons.gov.uk

Further information

If you feel your application has not been treated in accordance with the Recruitment Principles and you wish to make a complaint, in the first instance, you should contact recruitment.complaints@ons.gov.uk. If you are not satisfied with the response you receive from the Department, you can contact the Civil Service Commission

Attachments

2721 Advert 1B Permanent - ONS National v1-00 (2) Opens in new window (pdf, 83kB)Role3_Census1_Requirements Opens in new window (pdf, 78kB)