Great place to work - Researcher IIEA Employee Review

Research jobs at the IIEA offer great opportunities to work on a range of different policy areas - given the range of issues covered, there's something for everyone. If you have the time, you can work on producing policy briefs and blogs, building practical writing/drafting experience. Through the IIEA's extensive events programmes you get to deal with visiting senior politicians, officials and policy experts. There's also great networking opportunities as you work closely with senior government department officials, Ambassadors to Ireland, senior management in big multinationals and prominent academics.

While the events programmes are what people might be most familiar with when it comes to the IIEA, there's a great research capacity there that is underutilised. Too much focus can be placed on events and not enough on producing regular content. In such a small organisation, management and hierarchical structures can be blurry. This leads to a lack of clear process and direction at times and oftentimes things are done on an ad-hoc basis. This can also be done in how the organisation treats employees affecting morale as staff can be treated differently on case by case basis. Efforts have been made in recent times to address some of this but issues remain. There can be control issues from longer-serving staff which results in some resistance to change.

Great place to work. Interesting subject matter and a really supportive and friendly work environment. It can be fast-moving but it's an environment in which initiative and passion for the work is recognised and rewarded.

Occasionally need to work long hours, but this is infrequent and generally not an issue for people passionate about their policy area.