Data Scientist

Date: 4 Jun 2024 Location: Noida, South Asia, IN Company: British Council
We support peace and prosperity by building connections, understanding and trust between people in the UK and countries worldwide.

We work directly with individuals to help them gain the skills, confidence and connections to transform their lives and shape a better world in partnership with the UK. We support them to build networks and explore creative ideas, to learn English, to get a high-quality education and to gain internationally recognised qualifications.

Working with people in over 200 countries and territories, we are on the ground in more than 100 countries. In 2021-22 we reached 650 million people.

Location - India Advant IT Park (75011601)

Closing date - Tuesday 18th June 2024 at 23:59 UK time

You must have the legal right to work in India at the time of application.

There is no relocation or sponsorship support.

British Council supports working in new ways such as hybrid working, subject to full approval by line management and conditional upon our ability to provide the appropriate level of service. This may not be appropriate for all roles but can be explored at interview.

About the role:

The People Data Scientist plays a critical role in helping the People function in the British Council optimise our human capital and foster a data-driven culture in People practices. This role empowers the British Council to make informed decisions, create a more engaged and diverse workforce, and drive their success through effective people management.
This role will leverage data science and statistics to drive strategic decisions related to human resources and people management within the British Council.

This role is responsible for prescriptive and predictive analysis to identify potential improvements across the full employee life cycle (including but not limited to talent acquisition, employee engagement, retention, and overall workforce management.), supporting senior management to make data driven decisions.

The application & interview process:

• Your supporting statement should include details of your professional data science portfolio, i.e. the models/projects/data products delivered and the business outcomes. It should also include your experience in managing - and presenting to - business stakeholders
• The interview stage will include a presentation on a recent data science project you have completed.
• Successful candidates at interview stage will be invited to a technical round where you will be provided a dataset and will need to use the CRISP-DM process, including exploratory data analysis (EDA), data pre-processing, feature selection, and visualisation to gain a comprehensive understanding of the dataset. Your analysis should involve various unsupervised learning techniques and dimensionality reduction methods. We expect this to be completed in python or R.

Main Responsibilities

Analysis and Problem Solving

• Conduct statistical analyses and develop modelling to support mid- and longer-term forecasting and scenario planning related to workforce needs, and to evaluate the effectiveness of different strategies.
• Identify and build automations to reduce manual effort and increase depth of analysis.
• Apply statistical methods and NPL methods to correlate employee engagement with other signals like retention, productivity and overall experience metrics
• Provide insight to key stakeholders to enable them to make informed decision making
• Translate complex data findings into clear, concise recommendations that align with the organization's goals and objectives.
• Stay abreast of industry trends, emerging technologies, and best practices in data science to continuously improve the organization's people data capabilities
• Plan, lead or contribute to analytical projects and offer support for wider British Council data projects
• Maintain data pipelines transferring key datasets from external sources into the British Councils data lake to enhance analytical work
• Review and quality assure code to maintain high programming and analytical standards
• Suggest and trial ideas for how to meet the changing evidence needs of the team, including using new datasets or analytical techniques
• Engage with data science colleagues across the British Council - and across UK government teams - to understand existing work and summarise for internal use
• Contribute to the learning culture within the team and across the wider data community. This includes attending Community of Practice sessions and supporting others to develop their skills

Relationship and Stakeholder Management

• Collaborate with the People function business partners, business leaders, and other relevant stakeholders to understand their data and insight needs and deliver timely insights.
• Work closely with regions and countries to support their understanding and use of people data science outputs

Minimum/essential requirements

• Knowledge, understanding, and experience of coding in Python (or similar programming language) for data cleaning, manipulation, analysis, and presentation.
• Experience of a broad range of analytical skills and techniques for drawing insight from data.
• Keen enthusiasm for learning and using data science techniques such as, and not limited to, reproducible analytical reports, natural language processing, machine learning, modelling, forecasting, automated testing, and web-scraping
• Experience of bringing together data from disparate sources to address complex problems
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including presenting analysis to non-analysts and visual representation of data
• Well-developed project and stakeholder management skills
• Experience of collaborative code development using version control
• Experience of and interest in using Natural Language Processing techniques
• Strong record of continued learning and development.

Language Requirements

The British Council systems and global processes operate in English. Written and verbal proficiency in English is required

Education and Qualifications

An undergraduate and/or postgraduate degree in data science, statistics, data engineering, or computer science.

A connected and trusted UK in a more connected and trusted world.

Equality , Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Statement

The British Council is committed to policies and practices of equality, diversity and inclusion across everything we do. We support all staff to make sure their behaviour is consistent with this commitment. We want to address under representation and encourage applicants from under-represented groups, in particular, but not exclusively, on grounds of ethnicity and disability. All disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria are guaranteed an interview and we have Disability Confident Employer Status. We welcome discussions about specific requirements or adjustments to enable participation and engagement in our work and activities.

The British Council is committed to safeguarding children, young people and adults who we work with.

We believe that all children and adults everywhere in the world deserve to live in safe environments and have the right to be protected from all forms of abuse, maltreatment and exploitation as set out in article 19, UNCRC (United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child) 1989.

Appointment to positions where there is direct involvement with vulnerable groups will be dependent on thorough checks being completed; these will include qualification checks, reference checks, identity & criminal record checks in line with legal requirements and with the British Councils Safeguarding policies for Adults and Children.

If you have any problems with your application please email askhr@britishcouncil.org

Please note: Applications to this role can only be considered when made through the Apply section of our careers website. Our ASK HR email is only to be used in case of a technical issue encountered when applying through the careers website. Emails with supporting statements and CV/Resumes sent to this email address will not be reviewed and will be deleted.