Chevening Career Plan Essay Example: Accessibility coordinator at a civic services organization

After my MSc in Disability Studies in the UK, I will return to my role as Accessibility Coordinator at Colombo Civic Services, a municipal agency serving over 200,000 residents. In the short term, I will build on a recent audit I coordinated with 15 disabled residents across three public service centres. That work secured tactile paving at entrances and lowered counters at two registration desks, but within four months staff had stacked boxes on the paving and a counter was reassigned. I will introduce a quarterly accessibility review checklist owned by each centre manager, with a target that 80 percent of agreed adjustments remain in place after six months. I will also record whether managers can explain the design rationale without my prompting, since that is the clearest sign the change has been internalised rather than tolerated. In the mid term, two to five years, I want to move accessibility upstream into procurement and design. I have started sharing audit notes with two officers in the city procurement unit and invited one to our last review meeting. The next step is co-drafting an accessibility annex for tender documents and piloting it on two planned service sites, measuring adoption through procurement files and user walkthroughs after opening. Longer term, I will take tested approaches to the Sri Lanka Association of Accessibility Professionals, where I plan to present a short practitioner note, and run one joint workshop with Chevening peers working on inclusive public services. My current gap is practical: I cannot yet evaluate how design choices get embedded, or removed, inside procurement decisions. Studying UK public-sector accessibility practice, and asking Chevening peers to critique my tender annex before I submit it locally, will help me turn isolated fixes into routine institutional practice.