Claire Green

I’m currently working as a senior transport policy officer at East Riding of Yorkshire Council. I was seconded to the Council from my previous job at a consultancy to help out in the preparation of the Council’s third Local Transport Plan (LTP3). When a role came up at the Council I successfully applied for it and I’ve now been here for just over two years in total.

I started my master's degree at ITS after I’d had about 18 months experience in the field of transport planning. My previous employers paid for me to attend the course on a part-time basis, attending university for one day a week and studying at weekends. I feel that I started the course at the perfect time during my career development because my job and the master's programme were so well integrated and the things I learnt in lectures could be applied to the ‘real life’ projects that I was involved with at work.

“For me, the ITS experience has been invaluable  Through the course we learnt about transport modelling, traffic surveys, engineering standards, technical drawing, mapping, policy – too many to list here, and certainly more than you could pick up solely in the workplace. In addition, the course built on skills such as report writing, time management and problem solving, all of which are highly valued in the working environment. The module on transport planning and policy was really useful for me as I completed it just before I started my role in transport policy. It gave me a good grounding in the basic issues and gave me a head start in getting to grips with my new job.to helping me progress in my chosen career. I gained such a wide range of skills from the course, and they really boosted my CV and made me stand out above other similar individuals without the master’s qualification.”

I had moved to Leeds after completing my undergraduate degree and my previous employer, Pell Frischmann, were based in Wakefield. Several of my colleagues had already completed the master's course at ITS and based on their feedback I attended the open day and decided that it was a good option for me. Hopefully, I can continue to progress up the career ladder, slowly taking on more responsibility and becoming more involved in a range of transport projects. I would also like to work towards getting the Transport Planning Professional qualification in a few years time.

If you are considering applying to do a course at ITS then the best advice I could give would be to ask around for feedback from past graduates. The staff at ITS are also really approachable and will answer any questions you may have, and the open day gave me a really good idea of what I could expect from the course and what would be expected of me.