What attracted you to a career in Europe?
I began my career in the UK civil service but as a modern languages graduate, I was always interested in working abroad. After being involved in negotiations for setting up the single market in air transport, I decided Europe was a place I'd much rather be working. I got myself seconded here, passed the competition to join the Commission and have been here 19 years.
I began on the starting grade and have worked my way up through a range of fascinating and varied jobs from change management and communications to civil service reform and recruitment. I've worked in half a dozen Commission departments and in the private offices of two vice presidents of the Commission.
What has surprised you about your career in Europe?
My experience is that you can be given lots of responsibility from a young age. People outside think the Commission is an enormous bureaucratic army, but actually you can often be working in small teams, and quite early on you can find yourself with a lot of responsibility. People believe this myth of faceless form-filling bureaucrats. But working here is anything but grey.
It's an incredibly colourful environment, working with 27 nationalities, all speaking different languages – yet working together on a variety of complex problems and finding solutions that can be applied across the whole EU. You have to think on your feet and work fast – and that's not at all what many people expect.
And Brussels is such a cosmopolitan city, attracting people from all over the globe – a constantly changing kaleidoscope of bright, open-minded, stimulating people, right in the heart of Europe.
What kinds of skills and attributes are needed to be successful?
There are a range of competences that people need to be a very good EU official, beyond having a high level of academic ability and intelligence. You should be able to analyse complex problems, prioritise and organise - because you always have way more to do than you can achieve in a day. You need to be able to deliver quality and results on time – if you're asked to produce a two-page document for the Commissioner by 5pm tomorrow, we don't want someone who will produce 20 pages by next week. And you need resilience – working in a political, multinational, multi-lingual and multicultural organisation can sometimes be frustrating and difficult. They must be able to take that in their stride.
Why is it important to have British graduates working in EU institutions?
People don't work here to represent their country, or peddle their government's line. It's more subtle than that. I like to bake cakes and you need to have a whole range of ingredients to make a good cake – without each ingredient it won't taste as good. Take lawyers as an example: we have to propose draft legislation that takes account of the situation in each member state. If we don't have representation from each member state, we are less able to do that.
What specific opportunities are available now?
We're looking to recruit 205 people to the AD5 starting grade, while at AD7, where we require six years professional experience, we are looking for 77 people in five areas: European public administration, for which we need generalists, law, audit, communications and external relations.
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