Thread: My 20 years in the Public Service

Originally Posted by Iain

I'm sure this would never happen in the public sector.

Hey Iain, don't you mean private sector??...this where you have one of two status...employed or unemployed. When I worked in a Commonwealth department there was many qualified for the latter without them even leaving the public sector .

My resume looks very impressive but has little to do with what I do now. I find in the private sector its a matter of what you can do, not what a piece of paper says you have done.

I even have some qualifications and certificates from the government for courses of which I have no recollection of:confused: ..Oh well. I also have some former work colleagues who believe I have certain skills & qualifications which are not in my resume . Some of these undocumented skills seem to come to the fore in demolition jobs:eek: .

Oh bugger, I just noticed I'm logged on as the missus...dam that little remember me tick box ...is this illegal. ??? Hey Iain its Squizzy . Thats what ya get for using her machine early in the morning!.

Cheers

I've worked in both the private and the public sector - 15 years in public, the rest in private. I've seen the best and worst of both worlds. Guess what, the worst management and business practices were in the PRIVATE sector - two businesses. The public service came in third and it was every bit as bad as the horror stories we all love to share. The most corrupt business was private. The most callous disregard of employees was private. Sorry, but the private sector, small business especially, can make the public sector look glowing at its worst.

However, at the other end of the scale, the people who were doing it WELL. The best employers and the best run business was PRIVATE. I worked for some good managers in public and with hard working, dedicated people in public, but excellent management was rare, good management was stifled and I worked with some of the slackest in public.

In summary, public service fills a middle ground and the private sector is free to exploit the extremes of good and bad management. Small businesses especially fall victim to this, probably because they are at the mercy of one or two people whereas a larger firm and the government have a corporate entity 'monitoring' them.

Cheers
Richard

The Department I'm in has changed it's name 4 times in 3 years. And we had 3 names over a 3 week period.

Originally Posted by Slavo

The Department I'm in has changed it's name 4 times in 3 years. And we had 3 names over a 3 week period.

Three names over a three week period. That's impressive even for the public service.

I worked for a private company that was about to loose one of its franchises. So they invited the Jap company rep out to dinner, got him very drunk, then tricked him into signing the contract for another year. Surprisingly, we had trouble getting stock and received no advertising fliers that year.

Cheers
Richard

Iain.

Know exactly where you're coming from. Now it's not just the various units, branches and groups getting the name changes, the Vic. Govt. wants to change our name. They want to change it from Victoria Police Force to Victoria Police or Victoria Police Dept because the word 'Force' is a bit strong. It's like when they changed the lettering on the Police cars, the word 'POLICE' (uppercase) was changed to a "non aggressive" lower case 'Police'. It's truly pathetic to think that people even notice, let alone care. :mad:

Originally Posted by flea1607

My resume looks very impressive but has little to do with what I do now. I find in the private sector its a matter of what you can do, not what a piece of paper says you have done.
Cheers

Being a headhunter, a lot of my time is spent having to rework candidates'cv's prior to submitting them to Clients for consideration. In fact, I spent over an hour last night on the phone with one candidate getting information from himthat I knew he had ommitted from his CV which was probably one of the worst I have ever seen,,,,,,This guy incidentally is MD of his present company and Im putting him forward for another MD position with one of my clients where he will be looking at a basic salary of C £130K!,,, and he didnt have his CV up to date or well prepared. Normally i would drop such a candidate but this guy is right for the job in my opinion so hes worth putting in the effort for.

A word of advice to all in the job market,, always have your CV up to date and be aware of what your CV should say about you. A badly prepared and worded Cv is guaranteed not to get you that new job. It really is the most important document you have in your search for a new job and if you prepare it correctly,even font style and size is important, you will almost always get to that important first interview stage.

Anyone looking for tips on how to prepare the perfect CV let me know.
Beejay1

http://community.webshots.com/user/eunos9

Originally Posted by Slavo

The Department I'm in has changed it's name 4 times in 3 years. And we had 3 names over a 3 week period.

WC&IC, WRC, DLWC, DSNR, DIPNR etc? An excellent department not to be employed by any more, being led into irrelevance by a succession of incompetent ministers and DGs.

As the result of a phone call this morniong, I was topping up my CV. It's a shock to see nearly 40 years in your profession reduced to a couple of pages, and to think of the great times & people that are hidden behind a couple of lines.

The best place I ever worked was a local water authority not too far from Brudda, with 140 people. If the storeman's assistant needed to, he could knock on the chairman's door, & vice versa. Another good one was a big mining company. They worked their staff hard, but looked after you when you needed it.

I've got a couple of unemployed Subarus down the back yard and they both have near new CVs'.... :confused: :confused: :confused:

Seriously, I wouldn't have a clue what a "CV" even looked like!

Think of the higher unemployment figures if we did not have these bods sitting on their backsides thinking up new names for departments and then needing new stationery etc. Maybe I am too cynical.

Originally Posted by Tom Anderson

Think of the higher unemployment figures if we did not have these bods sitting on their backsides thinking up new names for departments and then needing new stationery etc. Maybe I am too cynical.

Wouldn't make any difference. They are already doctored so much that they are no longer relevant. They are only there to help the pollies disguise the true unemployment situation. They would just doctor the figures even more.


Peter.

I worked for PMG/Telecom/Telstra in Sydney for 30 years and three of the last 10 years I did practically nothing.
The problems we had in the IT group was that they would recycle national managers every year or so. Each manager would dump the previous manager's national plan and implement his own three year plan. Then a year later he would move and the next guy would implement his own plan. It was like Stalin's Russia and the five year plans every two years after a purge.
Consequently we never got anything done. It reached the stage where I went in the state managers office, knelt in front of his desk and begged for something to do. It got me 2 weeks in Grafton to fix up their network.
For the next few months I would get in at 8am, sit around till 10am then go to the coffee shop with one of the women in our group. We would get back to work at 11am, do nothing, then at noon we would all march to the Rag and Famish, party for two hours. work till 3pm then down to the coffee shop, home by 5pm and re-energise for the ritual the next day.
You can only do that for so long so I ended up emailing my national manager to try to change things. BIG MISTAKE!! He called me and told me that if I couldn't work within the system he would find someone who could. I called him a f****** a**hole and hung up.
My state manager came out of his office all red faced a short time later
"What the hell are you doing calling the national manager a f****** a**hole."
"He is!!"
"I know, but you're not supposed to tell him that."
I was in the doghouse for a while then I got headhunted by another group, worked like a dog and had the time of my life.
Having a penchant for speaking your mind in the workplace can get you into hot water but it makes it a lot easier to get a redundancy and retire at 45.

I don't know what IT groups are like now but when computer systems were starting to take hold, none of the managers knew what they were doing so you could do what you wanted and spend what you wanted and anytime someone questioned your spending you just started talking about megabytes, VGA v's EGA and data sniffers and the manager's face would go blank. I suspect there is still a lot of time wasting but budgets would be tighter.

END OF BORING RANT.

Originally Posted by adrian

Having a penchant for speaking your mind in the workplace can get you into hot water but it makes it a lot easier to get a redundancy and retire at 45.

I wish I could tell my boss what I thought of him and then get a nice payout!

Who dares wins

Originally Posted by DanP

Iain.

It's like when they changed the lettering on the Police cars, the word 'POLICE' (uppercase) was changed to a "non aggressive" lower case 'Police'. It's truly pathetic to think that people even notice, let alone care. :mad:

I noticed,( I didnt realy) but I cant wait for you lot to say "sorry sir" for pulling me over when Im doing 200khs, "but heres some flowers, and please dont do it again you wickle waskle"

Al