Personal Assistant

This is a role for a personal assistant (PA), providing support for 1 Director and Deputy Directors in a rapidly growing directorate. The role sits in a small business support team for the Electricity Security & Market Reform directorate.

The post provides an excellent opportunity to build on existing skills, develop new ones, and gain exposure to a wide range of new and up-and-coming policy areas. Within this role, you will be the first point of contact for the Director and Deputy Directors' diaries and be a familiar face throughout the directorate.

The Electricity Security & Market Reform Directorate is a friendly place, and we have teams covering a broad range of energy-related policy subjects, you will find ample opportunities for career development. We are a diverse and welcoming bunch, with a range of different career paths and levels of experience within the Civil Service.

We are committed to work-life balance and flexible working and the Directorate has senior sponsored groups focussing on making the directorate the best place to work in DESNZ. You will have the opportunity to shape how we work together, for example joining diversity and inclusion networks.

Person specification

• Run two or more diaries on a daily basis to ensure the Director and Deputy Directors' time is effectively organised and prioritised and maintain a balance of meetings and desk time.
• Proactively running the Director and Deputy Directors’ mailbox, ensuring they are aware of urgent or important e-mails, forwarding on for action or information or looking after them yourself where appropriate.
• Support the Director and Deputy Directors to balance a range of senior partner meetings, advising on urgent requests and suggesting delegation of meetings when necessary.
• Arrange meetings and requests from internal and external partners. This includes checking availability of attendees; booking rooms; providing conference call details; issuing appointments; rescheduling if necessary; arranging deputies and ordering refreshments and collecting visitors if needed.
• Prepare meeting papers, obtaining background papers, briefing notes, etc and liaising with meeting organisers or others to ensure your Director or Deputy Director has everything they require.
• Booking travel arrangements for the Director and Deputy Directors, and occasionally the wider team when necessary.
• Build strong working relationships with other Deputy Directors in the directorate, their PAs and the wider team.
• Co-ordinate offsite, and events for the team or the directorate
• Undertaking duties and tasks as assigned by the Director and Deputy Directors, such as expenses
• As part of our Business Support team, you'll help deliver essential services across the directorate, from supporting recruitment campaigns, processing invoices to raising Purchase Orders.
• Depending on the role there is the opportunity to spend a proportion of your time supporting the policy team. This policy support is flexible and may include things like providing the secretariat for policy boards or helping with policy workstreams.

Essential Criteria

• Strong organisational and prioritisation skills, with the ability to manage multiple tasks and competing deadlines effectively.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to build positive working relationships with a wide range of stakeholders.
• Experience of working in a fast-paced environment and adapting to changing priorities.
• Ability to handle sensitive and confidential information with discretion and professionalism.
• Proficient in Microsoft Office applications (including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and able to maintain accurate records and information.

Desirable Criteria

• Experience in providing high-quality administrative and diary management support to senior leaders.
• Experience of organising meetings and events, including coordinating schedules, preparing papers and managing logistics.

Behaviours

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

• Delivering at Pace
• Working Together
• Making Effective Decisions

Alongside your salary of £30,940, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero contributes £8,963 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 Department for Energy Security and Net Zero offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

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, Strengths and Experience.

After submission of the first stage of your application you will be invited to complete a Civil Service Judgement Test. If you successfully pass the test, you will be invited to complete the final stage of the application.

Please complete the online tests as soon as possible (within 24-48 hours is recommended), the closing date for the tests is 23:55 on 31/08/2026. If you fail to complete the online test before the deadline your application will be withdrawn. Guidance for the test will be available when you are invited to take the test. The tests are administered online and accessed via the CS Jobs website.

You will be directed to the Talogy - True Talent – Scheduled Maintenance Window Webpage for online tests during an outage.

Our online test supplier will be performing scheduled maintenance between 4pm and Midnight on 30th August 2026. You will be unable to access tests during this period.

If you are in the middle of a test when the maintenance