development

New open access online Political Staffer Resource Centre

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The Political Staffer Resource Centre offers recommendations, advice and support for political advisers, their managers, and advocates for reform.

It’s an open access resource developed by Professor Jennifer Lees-Marshment at The University of Dundee from research on the human resource management of political staff – see https://www.dundee.ac.uk/political-staffer-resource-centre

It shares practical recommendations from interviewing political staffers and those working in close association with them about what best practices they had experienced, observed and developed over time when working in parliament and government. It covers:

  • The role of a Political Staffer – the different roles, skills required and motivations
  • Recruiting and selecting political staff – what to look for, where to find people, how to assess them
  • Orientating and onboarding political staff – how to learn the job, how to help other staff learn the job, including both informal and formal approaches
  • Ongoing training and career development – content to cover, how to train them on the job, self-training, and formal programmes
  • Making workloads in political offices feasible – prioritisation, planning, structures, self-managing workloads, enabling breaks and work-life balance
  • Giving impactful feedback – on the spot, more in-depth reviews, giving usable feedback and making room for dialogue
  • Building positive cultures in political offices – creating positive teams and safe spaces to grow and develop
  • Maintaining morale and motivation – setting a clear purpose, highlighting making a difference, being more connected and involved
  • Wellbeing strategies for political offices – acknowledging the pressures, restricting non-urgent out of hours contact and supporting effective leave

To access the resources complete a simple form https://www.dundee.ac.uk/political-staffer-resource-centre/access-gated-content It’s free to register.

And please share with anyone you know who is interested in this area – whether they are a current staffer especially if they are managing other advisers; a new staffer starting out; a civil servant who supports political staff; a politician who wants to understand how to get the best out of their staff; or a campaigner fighting for reform and investment in political staffing.

We want the resource centre to grow over time through global peer learning, so we have created a mechanism for people to share additional ideas for how they put these principles: just use the sharing solutions form https://www.dundee.ac.uk/political-staffer-resource-centre/sharing-solutions-form.

If you have any feedback, please email us on politicalstaffer@dundee.ac.uk

Political Staffer Resource Centre https://www.dundee.ac.uk/political-staffer-resource-centre

IPSA Consultation: ‘Professionalising the career path for MPs’ staff’

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The IPSA has opened a consultation entitled ‘Professionalising the career path for MPs’ staff’, and is inviting responses from MPs, staff and the general public.

As well as looking at training, it also seeks views on, but not limited to the following:

  • pay band structure
  • job families (One of the proposals is to create an additional leadership level above the three existing job families.)
  • job titles, roles and descriptions
  • default number of working hours per week
  • a proposed ring-fenced staff development budget for training, health and welfare

The consultation closes on 31 October 2025 and can be found here: https://www.theipsa.org.uk/publications/consultations

Training for Members’ Staff

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The Members’ and Members’ Staff Services Team, along with Teams across the House of Commons, provides a wide range of training, learning and development activities that have been developed to support Members’ staff in their different roles and responsibilities.

To see the dates of courses coming up soon, view the Monthly Training Bulletin. You can also find all the training available to Members’ Staff on ACT.

Note: you must have a parliamentary network account and be connected to the network in order to access the above links.