Lab Manager

The Behavioural Insights Team

Location Westminster
Salary c. £25,000 dependent on experience
Team BI Ventures
  • Closing: 12:00pm, 23rd Mar 2017 GMT

Job Description

The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) is looking for an exceptional candidate to work on our BI Ventures Team as a Lab Manager for Predictiv, BIT’s online experimentation platform. The role will involve working closely with Predictiv’s Research Lead and the Head of Ventures.

The role provides an excellent opportunity for someone from who has worked in an academic environment using laboratory and online experiments as a core methodology, and who is now looking for a new challenge. The role will involve conducting a range of experiments looking at behaviour across the policy spectrum, from investment and savings decisions, to trying to understand gang related crime. You will be working with colleagues within BIT and external customers. The experiments you work on will be linked to specific policy challenges and will be conducted as stand-alone pieces of work or in conjunction with field experiments.

The Behavioural Insights Team

The then Prime Minister created BIT in 2010 to apply behavioural science to public policy in the UK. In February 2014 we became a social purpose company, owned by the Cabinet Office, Nesta (an innovation charity) and our employees.

The Behavioural Insights Team works with governments around the world in almost every area of policy. Whilst the subject and output of our projects varies considerably, there are common threads: we try to understand the contexts in which people make decisions; we notice small details; we find out what has and hasn’t worked before; we come up with innovative ideas for solving policy problems and we measure everything we do as robustly as we can.

As well as displaying professional excellence, BIT selects staff on the basis of our company values: always prioritising social impact; empiricism and humility; fresh thinking, collaboration; and public service.

About Ventures at BIT

BI Ventures uses behavioural science to build scalable products with a social impact. BI Ventures is a relatively new team, led by the Head of Ventures and reporting into the Behavioural Insights Team’s Managing Director.

BI Ventures uses cutting-edge insights from the broad range of projects at BIT – including data science, successful interventions from field trials, qualitative research, policy research and the academic literature. These unique insights are the starting point for the development of digital products and services to solve social issues and by using these insights. Our objective is to create commercially viable start-ups that help to scale the impact of BIT’s interventions.

BI Ventures is at the heart of BIT’s three-year strategy. Therefore, there is an opportunity for the successful candidate to progress to a more senior role as BI Ventures grows.

About Predictiv, BIT’s Online Experimentation Platform

Predictiv is an online experimentation platform. It generates insights via the use of short, online behavioural tests designed and validated by BIT. It allows for quick, large-scale testing of behavioural interventions/stimuli, which allows us to rapidly prototype our interventions, test them for various characteristics, and then adapt them accordingly. They are also generally cheaper than other statistically valid research methods and provide robust data complementing the depth of insight gained through traditional qualitative methods.

Role and Responsibilities

The role is likely to involve:

  • supporting Predictiv’s Research Lead to build and validate various test templates (comprehension, consideration set, risk preferences), and modifying those templates to reflect the needs of specific experiments;
  • working alongside policy colleagues at BIT and with client organisations to design studies, particularly focused on implementing tests of hypotheses provided by customers;
  • cleaning data outputted from Predictiv and conducting analysis in line with trial protocols;
  • reporting on results to customers internally and externally - this may include presenting your findings to customers;
  • working with the BIT Research Lead and third party developers (contractors, agencies or offshore) to help guide the development of new features for the platform in response to BIT and client demand; and
  • supporting Predictiv client development, e.g. by presenting case studies to potential customers.
Essential

The Behavioural Insights Team brings people together with different skill sets. You must be able to demonstrate a balance of skills across those listed below, but we do not expect you to be exceptional in all the areas listed:

  • experience constructing tests using Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, or laboratory platforms such as zTree;
  • experience running studies using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or Prolific Academic;
  • experience or training in using and analysing experimental data sets (such as administrative data) for the purposes of evaluation or predictive modelling;
  • experience in visualising data and the results of analysis in a way that makes complex findings accessible and useful to an audience of policymakers and practitioners;
  • experience presenting data or summaries of findings to an audience;
  • ability to manage your own time across several projects, including some large scale projects;
  • ability to think creatively and pragmatically, challenging existing assumptions and thinking of solutions to implementation problems; and
  • experience using statistical software (ideally Stata).
Desirable

Finally, it would be desirable if you have:

  • a Masters or PhD in a relevant subject area (including, but not limited to, economics or psychology);
  • experience working in a startup environment or on a small product team; and
  • experience in client development.

Removing bias from the hiring process

Applications closed Thu 23rd Mar 2017

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Removing bias from the hiring process

  • Your application will be anonymously reviewed by our hiring team to ensure fairness
  • You won't need a CV to apply to this job

Applications closed Thu 23rd Mar 2017