£20,669 plus £1,750 location allowance and excellent benefits
Based at Hanslope Park, Milton Keynes, MK19 7BH
For a placement year commencing September 2021

At FCDO Services (formerly known as FCO Services), we protect information, assets and people for government bodies worldwide. Whether it’s building and repairing embassies, delivering diplomatic goods across borders, or installing secure IT for government buildings, our vital work is vast and highly impactful – and our Project Managers are involved in it all.

Are you currently studying Project Management, Construction Management or a related degree, with a year in industry as part of the course? Are you looking to spend 12 months getting to grips with the practical work involved in project management? Make your placement year mean more, with FCDO Services.

Join us for a year in industry and you won’t just build your skills; you’ll help deliver mission-critical services to government-level customers around the world. Maybe you’ll help build an embassy overseas. Or perhaps you’ll support teams working to repair a High Commission that’s centuries old. Whatever you do, you’ll know the engineering and construction projects you support are protecting the UK’s interests both at home and round the world.

Provide vital support for projects around the globe
You’ll be working within our Professional Services Centre, which handles more than 600 construction, refurbishment and alteration projects a year – everything from engineering a new secure government site to repairing an embassy hit by flooding. Your role on your placement will be to provide project and programme managers with support across a range of areas, such as processes and planning, financial performance and risk management. This will give you exposure to many different project management responsibilities, including creating project schedules, forecasting resource requirements and maintaining project financials. So, it’s important you maintain high standards, with a promise to be reliable, responsive, and build relationships with customers and colleagues at all levels.

Throughout your placement, you will be expected to focus on your development, seizing opportunities to increase your understanding and making the most of all the training we offer. Towards the end, you should have built up enough knowledge and skills to manage a small project of your own. Plus, if you do well over the year, there might even be the chance we’ll offer you a permanent position, so that after you go back to university and complete your final year, you can come back to us, ready to get your career off to a brilliant start.

Put everything you’ve learned into practice
You might have studied a Construction-based subject at undergraduate level, picking up strong technical skills and some basic project management studies. Alternatively, you might have been studying Project Management, and with that, you’ve gained a solid understanding of how to design, develop and implement projects. Either way, you’ll have strong IT, analytical and organisational skills, built over your first two or three years of university. A strong interest in construction would be ideal, but is not essential if you can show us your passion for what we do.

Ultimately, what’s most important is the commitment you bring to a team, your passion to make a valuable contribution, and your skill in building productive relationships with the people around you. If you’ve got all that, we’ll help you take what you’ve learned so far and turn it into practical experience, with an incredible real-world impact.

And get your career off to the best possible start
At FCDO Services, you won’t just do work with global impact, protecting information, assets and people all over the world. You’ll also gain experience that will make a real difference to your final year at university – not to mention to your career when you graduate. All that opportunity packed into just twelve months; it’s your future – bigger.

As we work to protect government buildings and data, all our employees have to undertake a Security Check (SC) before joining us. This is nothing to worry about, it’s simply to give assurance to our customers that we can be trusted in all we do. Then, if you’re offered a permanent position at the end of your placement, you’ll be required to go through Developed Vetting (DV). You can find out more about vetting here.

Want to see your future team’s work in action? Step into our Virtual Embassy and
select a guide – we suggest ‘delivering programmes and projects across the embassy’ – to take you round, to see how the team delivers for government customers and how you could help. Explore the embassy now at virtual-embassy.fcdoservicescareers.co.uk

Hanslope Park based posts attract a Location Allowance of £1,750 per annum.

FCDO Services are regulated by the Civil Service Commission.