As those of you that I am connected to on LinkedIn will know, I have recently started a new job. I’ve moved to the Joint Research Centre, which is the Commission’s in-house scientific service. I’m in the EU Policy Lab, working on “the strategic foresight agenda and … the development of foresight and horizon scanning studies, in particular technology foresight”.
It’s a huge change for me. I became a Commission spokesperson in June 2003 and since then just about all my roles have had a communication dimension. So that’s 20 years of having a pretty good idea of what I’m doing! And now, in a way, I’m starting over. Not that I don’t know what I’m doing – otherwise I guess I wouldn’t have got the job. I’ve been involved in the Foresight Hub set up within my previous department. My work at the (now apparently defunct 😱) University of Melbourne Centre for Workplace Leadership, which was right at that interface between research and policy, will also stand me in good stead.
Nonetheless, there’s a tentativeness in me that I haven’t experienced for quite some time. Not a bad thing to experience at my stage of life – it reminds me that there’s still so much out there to learn!
I hope that with this new, more exploratory, work, I will be able to use this platform more for working out loud. Watch out for my monthly lists of interesting reads, as a start, with the first one coming at the end of this month.