Member focus: mentee into mentor

Member Sabrina Schalz applied for the Fast Stream (FS) whilst pregnant, and took her baby with her to the FS Base Camp. Katherine Hutchinson finds out more about the support Schalz received when navigating the FS application and her decision to become a mentor herself.

Sabrina Schalz is an FDA member and former Fast Streamer, who now works in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. She applied for the Science and Engineering Fast Stream scheme following completion of her PhD, saying, “I felt that with being a scientist in the civil service, you have an actual impact on the real world straight away.

“When I first applied for the online tests, I was five months pregnant at the time. By the time I got to the assessment centre, I had my assessment booked in for ten days before my due date so it was a bit of a risky thing to do, but it was fine in the end.”

Schalz feels the most challenging part for her was she had “a lot of pregnancy insomnia. On the day of the assessment, I had been awake since about three in the morning and because of the pregnancy, I couldn’t have that much coffee, and I ended up really struggling through the assessment centre on barely any sleep. Then, as I was doing the science scheme, for that you also have to do a final selection board after the assessment centre, which I did two months after giving birth. So, my husband had to take some time off work to watch the baby so I could do the selection board task.

“Then [my son] was nine months old when I did Base Camp. So again, my husband came with me and the baby to Base Camp and spent three days watching him in the hotel room, which he then had to do again for the York Residential.”

Outlining the adjustments that were made available to support her throughout the Fast Stream, Schalz says: “They were really good about it. I mentioned that, because I was breastfeeding, I didn’t want to go away from home without the baby for long and so they covered the cost of bringing my husband with me, and we got a hotel room with spaces for two people rather than just one.

“Also, I got really lucky with my first posting team who ended up also being the team where I am doing my Grade 7 now. They had a lot of parents with young children, so they were used to it and were very accommodating.”

Schalz also says the Fast Stream’s flexi-time policy has been particularly useful: “I can pick up around nursery times and I can work my hours around that. I told them that I can’t travel overnight because of the baby and they’re totally fine with that as well. Everybody in the team kind of gets it, which is really good. They are always super accommodating.”

Discussing what she would like to see be introduced to support young parents in the civil service further, Schalz says: “I think that it’s very much down to luck what kind of team you’re based in, you could have a team where there’s no one else in that situation. My second year posting team, they were again doing their best, and were accommodating as much as they could, but they didn’t really get it as much because there were no parents in the team.

“I think if there was more dedicated support for that, depending on what kind of team you’re in, that would be useful because not everybody’s going to be as lucky as I was with that first posting. In particular, offering flexi time in every posting would be super helpful.”

Schalz has recently signed up to be a mentor on the FDA’s Public Sector Development and Mentoring Scheme, inspired to do so by the mentorship she received from within her team during her time on the Fast Stream: “I had a really good mentor when I was doing my first posting. She was really amazing and put a lot of effort into mentoring me, and that’s helped me a lot and paying that forward felt like the right thing to do. So I thought I’d sign up for as much mentoring as I could for now and help other Fast Streamers get to the same place the mentoring I received got me to. I think, again, with the postings, it’s very much luck based… some people have a very good team like I did and have a natural mentor within that, but other people don’t and they just have to hope for the best.”

As an FDA member, Schalz says that she has made particular use of the union’s FDA Learn programme’s professional learning and development sessions: “There’s a few different courses on things like writing Behaviours and preparing skills, so I did a few of them. I found them really helpful, especially because the Fast Stream assessment is a bit different to normal civil service recruitment, which I hadn’t done before. For getting my Grade 7, I needed to have those interview skills and be able to write proper Behaviours, so I was keen to do those sessions. It was really helpful to see what good Behaviors look like, and where to start with writing them.”