Behavioural Insights Principal

About Ofcom

As the UK's communications regulator, we're delivering vital work that helps keep the UK connected and shapes the future of how we'll stay connected with each other.

Our work covers everything from phones and broadband, through to TV, radio, the postal service, and wireless devices. We're also taking on the challenge of making the online world a safer place. And we need people of all backgrounds, skill sets, and experiences to help us achieve our goal of making communications work for everyone.

About the Team - Ofcom's BI Hub

Behavioural insights (BI) is widely used by governments and regulators in the UK. It can help us understand how people make decisions which we can then use to inform and design better policy, improve services and ultimately deliver positive results for citizens and consumers. BI is also being used to better understand how companies make decisions e.g. to understand service and product design decisions, and it can be used in compliance testing and monitoring.

Ofcom set up a Behavioural Insights Hub in 2020 and has since expanded its dedicated team of experts.

The BI Hub brings together colleagues with a range of different skills: behavioural scientists, behavioural economists, market researchers and statisticians. Ofcom's BI Hub:

1. Conducts its own primary research - such as online randomised control trials - to understand decision-making and drivers of behaviour change.
2. Translates academic research to inform policy.
3. Applies evidence-based frameworks and techniques to design and test behaviour change interventions.
4. Advises colleagues on how to use our research in their policy design.
5. Designs and implements behaviour change communication campaigns.
6. Publishes and blogs about our innovative work.

Purpose of the Role

This role sits alongside two other Principals in the Hub and together you will provide leadership and development for the BI Hub, scoping and overseeing its work programme, managing resources, and developing colleagues as BI specialists.

Key aspects of this role will be to lead a programme of behavioural research and analysis, identify and resource priority BI work areas across all the sectors Ofcom regulates, advise policy colleagues, embed behavioural thinking, and promote the benefits of behavioural insights to policy development across the organisation, and lead Ofcom's knowledge and learnings of BI.