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Life at FCDO Services

At FCDO Services, we do work that protects people around the world. Our work is as varied and vital as it gets, but we never lose sight of our people. We believe the best way to support them is by investing in the best and most inclusive working environment we can, with strong benefits, training, wellbeing options and support networks. Guided by our People Strategy, our vision is to have a working culture that empowers, engages and enables our people to thrive in delivering our objectives now – and into the future.

Rewards and benefits

We want to reward you for a job well done. It’s not just about salary either: we offer a well-rounded package that includes day-to-day benefits; long-term incentives, like pensions; and variable pay, including any relevant location allowances. Here’s what’s on offer:

Extremely competitive pension, with employer contributions between 26.6-30.3% of your salary (figures accurate for April 2021; subject to change – for more on employer contributions, see here)

  • 25-30 days of annual leave each year, depending on your length of service
  • 9 days a year in Public Holidays and Privilege Holidays
  • Leave trading, allowing you to buy or sell 10 days of annual leave per year
  • Exclusive discounts portal, offering year-round deals with high street brands
  • Cycle-to-Work scheme
  • On-site gym facilities and exercise classes
  • On-site OFSTED-registered nursery
  • On-site canteens and restaurants
  • Interest-free travel season ticket loans
  • Interest-free bicycle loans
  • Interest-free car loans for eligible overseas employees
  • Optional £40 a month membership to CSMA – a benefits club to help civil servants make the most of their free time, with shopping discounts, special rates on home and car insurance, breakdown service, events, experiences, holidays and more
  • Option £4.99 a month membership to CSSC Sports and Leisure – a not-for-profit membership organisation available to all Civil Service employees providing fantastic sports, leisure, benefits, and discounts
  • Supportive family leave policies for all staff with new families, with maternity, paternity and adoption pay – subject to meeting qualifying criteria, including service length
  • Flexible working options, depending on the nature of the role
  • Sick pay to support any long-term absence due to illness
  • A wide range of welfare support options, which you can read more about on our Diversity and Inclusion page  
  • London location allowance of £5000
  • Hanslope Park location allowance of £1750
  • Individual performance awards – which varied from £500-£3100 last year
  • Through the Th@nks scheme, recognition for individual or team contribution, with vouchers of up to £75 and cash rewards of up to £2000 over a 12-month period
  • Home and overseas allowances
  • Daily allowance for short working trips overseas

Did you know?

We have wellbeing rooms all over the world, as well as five facilities in the UK.
Even when you’re travelling regularly in your role, our wellbeing rooms overseas can help you find peace and calm.
room with soft furnishings and plants with sun shining through window

Our facilities

Hanslope Park

  • Free parking
  • Modern canteen
  • Free phone-charging stations
  • On-site OFSTED-registered nursery
  • Electric car charging stations
  • On-site gym
  • Wellbeing room
  • Tennis and football court/pitch
  • Discounted fitness classes

King Charles Street

  • Coffee shops
  • Deli bar
  • Restaurant/canteen
  • On-site OFSTED-registered nursery
  • Wellbeing room
  • Access to Language Centre Library for self-study
  • On-site gym
  • Discounted fitness classes
  • Easy access by train, bus and tube – with step-free access at Westminster and Green Park

Learning and Development

Your skills, aspirations and growth mean as much to us as the global mission we’re on. You’ll always feel supported to achieve more here. With a supportive community around you, you’ll feel encouraged and excited about the shape your career could take and we offer extensive opportunities for you to own your development and continuously grow. Even better, the results of the Civil Service People Survey for 2022-23 showed our learning and development score was five points above the benchmark, reflecting the focus we put on the growth of our staff.

FCDO Services’ Hera System

Our learning management system Hera gives every colleague full access to our learning catalogue. This can be via your desktop in the office, or via our app on the go. With digital courses, toolkits, videos, articles, Civil Service guides, and sign-ups for face-to-face workshops, you can learn in the way that suits you.

Management and Leadership Curriculum

Whatever your role, it’s important to keep learning, and there’s plenty of options to help you do that. Face-to-face workshops, videos and digital programmes are just the start of what’s on offer.

Mentoring programme

If you’d like a mentor to help you grow – or you’d like to become a mentor – our Talent & Development team runs an active programme of support and mentor-matching.

Diversity, inclusion and wellbeing

Through Hera, you’ll access extensive diversity learning options; some of them mandatory, some of them choices for you to explore.

Face-to-face learning

We offer a range of topics to boost your expertise, ranging from soft skills, like assertiveness and personal impact, to role-specific skills, like working at height.

Health and safety

Keeping your health and safety knowledge and skills up to date keeps our colleagues safe in everything they do. Our options here range from general workshops for all – e.g. basic fire safety awareness – to more specialist events, like asbestos awareness.

Gaining qualifications

We offer colleagues the chance to gain Chartered Management Institute qualifications at varying levels. Last year, these were delivered virtually to allow those across the UK and overseas to participate.

Work/life balance

We do our best work when we’re well-rested, happy and able to balance our workload with our personal lives. Here’s how we support colleagues to do that:

At the end of a day of rewarding challenges, we encourage a culture where colleagues go home on time.

Flexible working is common and comes in many forms: compressed hours, flexible hours, job shares are just a few. We’ve also cemented our approach to hybrid working so that most of our staff can balance their personal needs alongside those of our business.

We offer 25 days of annual leave, with an additional five days when you reach five years of service. You can also buy and sell up to ten days of leave per year – and carry up to ten days over into next year.

We offer paid maternity leave and adoption leave, and we support partners of all gender identities, with paid leave for husbands, wives, and partners whose other half is pregnant.

If the unexpected happens and you need to look after your family or your household, we’ll explore how we can support or help you, with discretionary special paid leave to help you cope with whatever comes.

Whether you need an extended period to care for your family, or to take a career break, we offer the opportunity to apply for special unpaid leave allowing you to return within two years.

Our colleagues are encouraged to support their community. Everyone is entitled to apply for paid special leave for volunteering activities, helping support those who need it.

You and your line manager might agree that you’d like to enrol in relevant further learning, at anything from GCSE to degree level. We can help with study leave and any resources you might need.

If you’re dedicated to helping others, we’ll support you. Special paid leave is offered for voluntary public service training, e.g. training as a Special Constable or a Retained Firefighter, as well as for youth leadership courses.

Did you know?

We don’t just support colleagues: we take care of the creatures who live around our sites.
And we’re working hard to make every aspect of FCDO Services as sustainable as possible:
wild bee Osmia bicornis looking out of insect hotel

Wood workshop colleagues build bird-feeding tables, and we also have on-site bee hotels to supplement natural habitats.

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We manufacture bespoke shipping crates to minimise weight, volume and shipping costs. And, where possible, we use 100% recyclable, honeycomb-structure cardboard boxes for our shipments.

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As part of our Sustainability Strategy and Action plan 2022-25, we’re building a culture of sustainable working practices and driving higher standards.

It’s family friendly here. It’s supportive. Flexible. All in all, it’s a very positive place to be.

How our salary bands work

We’re a trading fund – you’ll find out more about what that means here – and our employees are civil servants. That’s why we work within the pay policy set for all civil servants in teams across government.

So what does that mean to you? Well, when you see a job advertised, we’ll usually list the salary band next to it, e.g. £25,000-£35,000. Typically the starting salary for the role will be the smaller figure. In exceptional cases, offers may be made within the range, subject to knowledge and skills. Movement through the pay range for your grade is achieved through annual pay awards, in line with annually published Civil Service pay guidance and dependent on satisfactory performance.

If you apply for and successfully get a promotion or a new higher-paid role with us, you’ll then move to a higher grade and begin climbing through that new salary band.

Latest roles

Want to join FCDO Services but can’t see a live role to suit you? Great news: you can sign up for job alerts or add your CV to our talent pool and we’ll be in touch when something comes up.

Technical Security Countermeasures Officer

Hanslope Park
£38,351 Plus £1750 Location Allowance
View job

Service Transition Manager

Hanslope Park
£35,824 – £37,138 plus £1750 location allowance and excellent benefits
View job

Technical Installer

Hanslope Park
£29, 586 – £34,179 – plus £1,750 location allowance, and Excellent Benefits
View job