Performance and Budget Management Unit

The European Parliament stands for European democracy. We help connect it to people.  

This entails providing complete and impartial information to citizens and media about the European Parliament, and assisting Members in their communication activities. The Directorate-General for Communication (DG COMM) strives to reach and engage the right audience with the right message at the right time and in doing so, deliver world-class communication. We are committed communication professionals coming from various professional and academic backgrounds.

The main mission of the Performance and Budget Management Unit (PBMU) is to ensure an efficient and need-based allocation and use of financial resources, linking the data-driven communication approach to the budgetary planning process, and ensuring a regular monitoring of the use of financial resources via close monitoring of the budgetary planning, performance measurement and evaluation of actions.  The Unit also ensures the ex-ante verification of all financial transactions and of contracts linked to framework contracts, initiates contracts for the whole Directorate and services attached to the Director-General, and coordinates the financial management and management of the financial systems for the entire DG.

The focus of this traineeship will be on the performance measurement and data-driven projects, both already in place, as well as in development.

PBMU is an easygoing, results-oriented environment where the most important thing is to get projects to move forward.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the tasks at hand, they are all geared toward data and database management:

• Support in evaluation and measurement of communication actions and campaigns;
• Support in data collection and data cleaning;
• Creation of graphs, with very little use of pie charts;
• Building webservice connections and ETL;
• Participation in on-site and off-site evaluation processes (such as the European Youth Event);
• Participation in brainstorming sessions for on-going development of data visualisation solutions.

PBMU is looking for someone who:

• Is eager to work with data and evaluation in general;
• Has basic knowledge of project management (resources, objectives, indicators etc.);
• Has knowledge of MS Excel, this is a must;
• Has knowledge of other IT solutions, this is a plus (we are currently working with Power BI, Azure/AWS and Knime. If you know Python, we would be impressed);
• Has a sharp and curious mind, quick to learn and capable of providing support for tasks related to data management;
• Is solutions-oriented and likes coffee.