Policy Analyst

After graduating with a psychology degree, policy analyst Adam joined the SA Housing Authority’s graduate program and won a great job with the Authority. Adam gives us his thoughts about the graduate program and explains how his psychology knowledge and skills translate to his role in the Authority.

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Adam: “So I finished my three-year psychology degree at the end of 2022, and I was looking for jobs just on “I Work For SA” and happened to see one for the Housing Authority which had psychology listed as a preferred degree, and I applied for that and was lucky enough to get the role.

I get this question a lot from my friends and family and things because my degree isn’t directly linked to the sort of role – you wouldn’t think that a psychology degree is directly linked to planning and reporting, which is the team that I am in, but I have found that there a lot of transferrable skills typically in analysis and report writing, and those transferrable skills are really helpful in my current role. So even though your degree might not be specifically linked to what you are doing, you’ll find there are transferrable skills, and then obviously you get trained up as well to be more suitable for that position.

Yes, I really enjoyed my experience with the graduate program. I was lucky enough to have a manager that let me experience many different tasks, and I worked with a lot of different people in the organisation from different areas. I was lucky enough to have a broad opportunity to do a lot of different things, so it really enabled me to be exposed to see what I enjoyed and what I didn’t enjoy as much, and then from there I was able to tailor my experience to do some of those things that I enjoyed more.

Yes, so at the end of the graduate program I was lucky enough to land a role within my team as a policy analyst, and that’s the role I’m currently in.

We do a lot of work obviously in the planning and reporting team, so we do a lot of work with business units, business plan updating, and we’re currently working on a project relating to the Authority’s business planning, and that involves just messaging people from different aspects of the Authority.

We also do a lot of consultation work, so if a plan is put out by another organisation, we often go out to SAHA (SA Housing Authority) and we go to different parts of the Authority and we connect with the business units to get their thoughts, and then we compile that together. It’s a process where there’s a lot of back and forth in that and making sure those views are put together.”

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