I work for Oranga Tamariki, Ministry for Children. It is a government department responsible for the care, protection, and wellbeing of children in New Zealand.
I am an analyst within the Analytics and Insights team in the Evidence Centre, I handle ad hoc requests for quantitative data and insights about the care and protection population. My typical day is a mix of coding, meetings and drafting reports. I do a mixture of analysis on our internal data (data that has been input by social workers about the children in our care), and cross-governmental data (data that comes from Statistics New Zealand’s integrated data infrastructure (IDI)). At the moment I am working on a lot of projects surrounding disability within the care and protection population, where we are aiming to get a better understanding of this cohort in order to better support them and more effectively use our resources in this area.
I grew up in Gisborne, and after high school, I went to Uni to study biology with the idea that although I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, I liked the idea of research. Uni is where I fell in love with statistics and when I decided that whatever I’m doing I wanted it to have an analytical lens. Sticking to my initial plans and going down the research path, I did a postgraduate diploma in bioinformatics and planned to do a masters studying early life adversity, gene regulation and childhood disease.
The summer before I started my thesis, I applied for an internship with Analytics Research in Government programme, as I thought it would be good to see what else is out there work-wise. The internship placed me with Oranga Tamariki, where I did a project investigating factors of care and how they are associated with outcomes in later life. I really enjoyed my time there and became super passionate about the well-being of Tamariki. After the internship, I started my master's.
My master's was really tough, the first wave of COVID and the general environment of academia made me realise even more that I loved statistics and I don’t need to be a researcher with a PhD to do that. Before I finished, I reached back out to my old manager at Oranga Tamariki and was offered the job as an analyst the day after I handed in my thesis.
Absolutely! Different backgrounds bring an often much needed different perspective to our work. A large proportion of my job revolves around the interpretation of data, but what numbers mean can differ wildly depending on who is interpreting them. So, it’s good to get a wide range of backgrounds in the room so we can compare all different perspectives.
Although I have a rather analytical mind and I love my coding, we also love people who can act as a translator of more complex analytical information into layman’s terms. There is definitely a need for more people like this as with them the analyses can reach a broader audience!
Everyone that I meet at this organisation, whether it’s from policy, the management or if they are front line social workers, are all super passionate about their job. It makes it really easy to communicate with people across the organisation when not only are we all moving in the same direction but with the same drive for change and improvement as myself.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the effect that your work has on the “big picture” of progress towards our organisational goals. The organisation is so big, and it feels like sometimes you have to move a mountain to make a change. However, this is the nature of government, nothing is done without lengthy and well-informed thought and planning. I’m sure my ability to see the change that my research creates a ripple through to organisational change will only come with time though.