public sector job application

[hubgearfreak]

the public sector workers were much harder working and took fewer days off.

go on, i challenge you to find any evidence at all to support that claim

as for dealing with the public on low pay, there's millions of bar staff, restuarant staff, retail staff all doing it for £6/ph

[kwackers]

the public sector workers were much harder working and took fewer days off.

go on, i challenge you to find any evidence at all to support that claim

as for dealing with the public on low pay, there's millions of bar staff, restuarant staff, retail staff all doing it for £6/ph

I seem to remember someone whinging on the TV a while ago that the public sector took more days off. Could be nonsense and it probably varies from office to office but the implication was that taken as a whole this was true.
Must be figures out there to support or refute this??

[SiF]

Well my wife's a (staff) nurse. £30K per year + unsociable hours + 37 days per year holiday (+bh's) + final salary pension.

Not bad when you consider that there are no qualifications required on entry, and you get to take twice as many sick days off per year! And there is limited real accountability.

The previous Govt. were not very good negotiators when deriving the contract changes for 'agenda for change', with the GPs doing very well out of it. And now it is starting to be rolled back ....

[thirdcrank]

I'd still say that for somebody working within local government - as opposed to for local government, previous experience must be an advantage. Taking the latter first, there will be all sorts of public sector jobs - a lot fewer than once was the case - where the work could be done externally. With regard to pay and conditions, it's just a case that the job market has changed. Formerly, local authorities were in direct competition with high-paying private employers and the only way they could get staff without paying big wages was to make pension promises etc. (It's not a million years ago that some big public sector employers like London Transport and the NHS actively recruited in the West Indies.) Now, in a changed labour market, employment agencies can recruit people for all sorts of work and keep costs down through short-term contracts.

OTOH, by its nature, local government is organised differently from a firm. A firm has to make a profit or fail. Local government is expected to provide public services which, in theory at least, are offered on the basis of need rather than profit (and the dividing line has shifted in the last couple of decades.) Firms thrive on innovation etc. Local government can only do things, especially spending money, where they have either a legal duty or discretionary power to do so. (I understand that this is why until quite recently, town clerks traditionall wore judicial wigs.) This means that where private sector decisionmakers must look at the bottom line and devise clever schemes to make sure they are on the right side of the Inland Revenue etc, in local government they must look towards budgets and decisions made by council committees. Put another way, although 'bureaucracy' is now generally used in a derogatory sense, local government is bureaucratic in the sense that decisions are intended to be taken according to fair rules, by officials who do not personally profit from the process. It may not always turn out like that, but that's not the point.

[hubgearfreak]

in local government they must look towards budgets and decisions made by council committees.

Fair enough TC, if the post was one that involved decision making in budgets, answering to the electorate and things, that's fine. but what about the many, many jobs in local gov. that don't require budgery decisions (receptionist for example), is it fair to put any weight at all on local gov. experience in the recruitment process??

[thirdcrank]

I thought I had covered that point (by making the distinction between 'working in' and 'working for'.)

[hubgearfreak]

i don't see where you have.

let's take the example of a receptionist. they need a person who can (amongst other things)

1. type
2. be friendly and clear on phone and face to face
3. be computer literate etc.

they list the requirements of the person in the person specification, and go on to add;

4. have local gov. experience.

i don't get the need for point 4. in my mind it's a bit discriminatory

and no-one's put up a clear case for the inclusion of point 4., or the iten in the OP

[Deckie]

Surely it's obvious?

As a receptionist in the public sector you will have to have worked for a considerable period both within AND outside the public sector. How else would you develop the unique language skills required to translate public sector jargon into English for any one in the real world?

[MikewsMITH2]

I nearly swerved off the road listening to Radio 4 last week about the Chief Fire Officer for Hereford (I think) who had allegedly manipulated his job description to retire at 50 with a lump sum of £300K and pension of £60K. Apparently he should have waited until he's 55 as he doesn't have a front line role any more.Anyway they can't retire him so they are reportedly paying the new man and also him a salary of £110K p.a. until he's old enough to retire. astonishing a Chief Fire Officer does I don't know, but I wished I'd been one.

[goatwarden]

Referring to the OP, and being very cynical in my regard of most of the world, I would suggest the recruiting body don’t realise the requirement is there.

When I worked for a big company (big enough to have several disparate personnel departments) they seemed to lack much knowledge of “standard documents”. Often, when we were recruiting, I would assume that my personnel colleagues, once furnished with the requisite list of technical requirements for the job by me, would be capable of producing a meaningful person and job specification to put out. In the event it was usually a stream of generalities which appeared to ask for skills and properties which were irrelevant to the role; whenever I questioned such details I would simply be advised “we always put that”.

People are often essentially lazy and such laziness is often systematic in organisations. We always put that, so why question it now?

[hubgearfreak]

goatwarden, i believe that's the best answer yet and most likely to be the truth.

so, is it discrimination?

[goatwarden]

Ah, sorry, despite referring to the OP, I managed to ignore the question actually posed.

In my opinion it is discrimination. Clearly who you have worked for makes no difference if you display the skills and knowledge appropriate to the role. In this instance I don’t believe it is deliberate (partly due to the scenario suggested in my previous post). It is surely obvious that any organisation should only recruit in the real world once they have exhausted their existing resource pool. So advertising to an audience that includes private sector, it seems to automatically discriminate against those who have only previously worked for the Daily Mail and other non-public sector organisations.

Taken at face value that could imply that, by asking for a degree in Metallurgy, you discriminate against those without such a qualification. However, the degree implies the previous acquisition of certain skills and knowledge. If working in the public sector (supposedly a big slice of total employment in the UK) is so different from the rest of the world as to preclude the employment of anyone from outside then it must be very different to the rest of the world. People to-and-fro between large private sector companies all the time; their skills are fully transferrable. If not equally transferrable into public sector then it suggests incompatible and thus outdated of inefficient business practices within the public sector.

If my above suggestion is correct then I would assume the reverse must be true which doesn’t bode well for all the poor souls currently in public sector employment who may not be in the near future.

Since most of the media discussion I have observed recently concerning public sector “cuts” actually seems to be about outsourcing (in my understanding a “cut” means something which exists today won’t exist after the cut; I fail to understand how paying a third party for the same resource plus their profit represents a saving to anyone.) I would suggest in many cases the same people will continue to do the same work but for a private company not the council.

[thirdcrank]

i don't see where you have. ....

The point I was trying to make, which I thought I had, is that a lot of jobs where local government is the employer, could be done equally well by somebody with or without experience of that sector. (And as I also said, one reason that local government has employed so many people directly was that for long enough, it was the cheapest way to do it, while all the pension costs were being run up but ignored. That's hardly the fault of the employees, more to do with an earlier generation of politicians of every stripe.) These are being increasingly transferred to the private sector, either directly, when whole departments are put out to contract, or indirectly, when employment agencies are used to provide staff. You gave the example of a receptionist - just the sort of job employers turn to an agency for - and I'm not suggesting that previous experience in local government is relevant. OTOH, some relatively low-level jobs where accounting - in the loosest possible sense - not accountancy but just accounting for the £££ is involved, do require an understanding of local government procedures, AFAIK.

A lot of what we are seeing now is a new generation of politicians trying to find a way of reneging and demonising a lot of people in the process.

For young people, the situation now seems bleak, for all sorts of reasons, something I'm acutely aware of as a parent and grand-parent. To anybody older who now wishes they had chosen a different career path and, for example, eschewed the immediate advantages of whatever attracted them all those years ago and now wishes with hindsight, that they had made different choices, it's too late, I'm afraid.

[patricktaylor]

if one's applying for a job in the public sector, and it's stated on the job application;

Previous Local Government experience D3 with D3 being D = desirable, and 3 = the highest weighting

is it just me, or does this smack of discrimination?

Discrimination, possibly.

It's over ten years since I worked in the public sector so things might have changed, but there was an Equal Opportunities policy which required every job to have a Person Specification (as well as a Job Description). External applicants could (and did) challenge the employer if an internal applicant was appointed who didn't match the Person Specification as well as the external applicant. In other words, no advantage internally.

To advertise that previous Local Government experience is an advantage we would have had to prove it in the Person Specification - not easy.

But there was also a Redeployment Policy. Any employee about to be made redundant was first offered a suitable internal vacant post if one existed and provided they matched the Person Specification. It would rarely have been possible to favour internal applicants unless they were about to be made redundant.

[pete75]

People to-and-fro between large private sector companies all the time; their skills are fully transferrable. If not equally transferrable into public sector then it suggests incompatible and thus outdated of inefficient business practices within the public sector.

You're making a very big assumption namely that private sector industry in this country is efficient. Much of the evidence is to the contrary. Those private industries exposed to direct competion with foreign companies through imports have largely ceased to exist. The one private sector success appeared to be the financial sector which recently imploded and had to be rescued with bale outs from the public.

I've recently transfered from the public to private sector as part of an outsourcing deal. The difference is that the private sector company is more beauracratic, less responsive and flexible and has a much more rigid and hierarchical management structure than when our department was part of the council. Efficiency has dropped.

I suspect that most of the anti public sector comments aren't based on first hand knowledge or experience but on ignorance and prejudice.

In any job , even one with largely transferable skills, it helps if people have knowledge of and have worked in the industry/sector concerned. That's the reason why the job spec quoted put public sector experience as desirable. If it meant to exclude any private sector applicants it would have put it as essential.