Career Heroes - Aidan Toal

Tell us more about you

I’m an Assistant Economist in the Northern Ireland Civil Service. In my spare time, I enjoy cooking but often most of my time is spent chasing after my dog, Hennessy. When I get out of the house I meet up with friends and can usually be found rowing up the Lagan most Saturday mornings.

What kind of work do you do?

I work as an Assistant Economist in a Business Consultancy Unit. We work across the nine government departments in Northern Ireland. Most of my work revolves around completing reviews and evaluations of ongoing or completed projects and programmes.

As an economist, my work is particularly focused on assessing the efficiency and value for money of a project or programme. This requires gathering evidence through records and consultations of the costs associated with setting up and running a project.

With this information, I compare costs to similar projects being run in NI and further afield. From this, I can determine if resources were allocated in the most efficient manner and whether the best possible service was delivered at the lowest possible cost. These evaluations are used to inform the design of future projects or decide if a project can continue in its current form.

I write business cases that detail the need and requirements for a proposed project. This is an essential requirement to attain public funding for a project. These projects often require hundreds of thousands or millions of pounds in public funding and this document ultimately acts as the gatekeeper.

We have a hybrid working policy and I mostly work virtually but I meet my colleagues occasionally in the office or when we are out on the road to meet clients. A lot of my work is done in small teams of 3 or 4 people. We have regular checkpoint meetings throughout the week where we have discussions and present what we have completed or discovered. Outside of these meetings we work on our respective sections independently.

How did you become a Assistant Economist?

At school, I chose Politics, Economics, and Maths to study at A Level. I had no previous experience of economics and wasn’t even sure what economists do! I became intrigued by the subject and even though it was my worst performing out of the three, I sought to pursue it and I went on to study Economics at Queen’s University, Belfast. After three intense years of studying, I graduated with First-Class Honours.

If you could do-over, What would you do differently?

It’s never too early to make that connection with the company you want to work in.