To wonder what it's like working for the civil service?

[malificent7]

I do enjoy my current role in healthcare but i've been hearing about how good the perks of the civil service are.
Tbh i know nothing about it and I suppose there are a wide range of roles, pay grades etc. Please can you all tell me what it's like? Good and bad.

I work for the Civil Service, but I'm not going to tell you which department as I'm scared I'll get booed

The Civil Service is huge, with many different departments, so you'll get many different answers.

But for me:
Good

• Flexibility - my department is excellent at working flexibly. We have flexi, but also you can work any part time/term time hours you want. I work 10 over 9, meaning I work an additional 45mins per day and I get every other Friday off, as well as full flexi
• Career Progression - Whilst promotion/application process is clunky, there are so many opportunities for promotion or applying for different CS departments.

Bad

• Pay - again whilst it is well paid, if I did the same job in the private sector, I'd be on treble what I earn. However, my job is safe.
• Red Tape - crikey oh mighty, the amount of paperwork, spreadsheets, forms I have to fill in is insane. Some of it is useless.

I could go on, but I think think that's a good starting point

Its both brilliant and frustrating. However "the civil service" covers everything from my DP who is a prison officer, to my friend who travels around doing consulate services for the FCO, to my ex-BIL who is a senior civil servant in VOSA. My job in a prison is totally different from someone who works in accounting at the MOD.

Everything tends to happen very slowly, everywhere though!

PS. What perks? Are the rest of you getting perks? I got a new chair two months ago, and a footrest because I have really short legs, plus I usually get some tomatoes in the summer... but not sure if these are actually perks!

@minou123

I work for the Civil Service, but I'm not going to tell you which department as I'm scared I'll get booed

The Civil Service is huge, with many different departments, so you'll get many different answers.

But for me:
Good

• Flexibility - my department is excellent at working flexibly. We have flexi, but also you can work any part time/term time hours you want. I work 10 over 9, meaning I work an additional 45mins per day and I get every other Friday off, as well as full flexi
• Career Progression - Whilst promotion/application process is clunky, there are so many opportunities for promotion or applying for different CS departments.

Bad

• Pay - again whilst it is well paid, if I did the same job in the private sector, I'd be on treble what I earn. However, my job is safe.
• Red Tape - crikey oh mighty, the amount of paperwork, spreadsheets, forms I have to fill in is insane. Some of it is useless.

I could go on, but I think think that's a good starting point

I second everything Minou has said. I would also add, I really like how interested and proactive my current department (and previous department) are with diversity and inclusion.

I’ve (mostly!) had very supportive and friendly colleagues, and the departments I’ve worked in have been very pleasant places to work.

The perks? Final salary pension is the biggest one. Accrued at different rates but I think about 1/70 per year. Work there for 30 years and retire with a salary of about 45% of salary over career term.
For example if your salary is 80k, your retirement salary would be circa 38k + state pension til death

34k is a better estimate having googled it

The civil service was where I discovered that there are people sitting behind desks purely counting down the days until they get to retire.

stuffy and boring

No idea what the job entails but the department of agriculture in NI employs approx 3 pencil pushers for every farmer. I’m guessing they don’t do an awful lot.

The flexible working and pension scheme is fantastic. The IT, endlessly drawn out processes, slow clunking everything, nepotism and sadly in my department appalling management are very frustrating.

There is no perfect workplace. Its all give and take. Work for civil service and understand nothing happens fast, you must do as you're told whether you agree or not. Don't expect to be thanked or appreciated.

I did some temping in the CS after uni. It was soul destroying, so inefficient & I had to slow down as not enough work. However good for family life eg flexi, holiday & can't knock the pension.

The civil service was where I discovered that there are people sitting behind desks purely counting down the days until they get to retire.

we dubbed them lifers 😆

@HeadToToesNo

The civil service was where I discovered that there are people sitting behind desks purely counting down the days until they get to retire.

That’s exactly what I am doing. Dreadful employers with no regard for employees at all. I’m sticking it out to maximise the pension

@Beth856

The perks? Final salary pension is the biggest one. Accrued at different rates but I think about 1/70 per year. Work there for 30 years and retire with a salary of about 45% of salary over career term. For example if your salary is 80k, your retirement salary would be circa 38k + state pension til death

Your info is woefully out of date.

I work in in the civil service.

Great in many ways, but they find the longest possible ways to complete the simplest tasks 🤦‍♀️

Your info is woefully out of date.

I think the poster means a direct benefit pension, which is still an incredible perk compared to what's on offer in the private sector (direct contribution).

@Beth856

The perks? Final salary pension is the biggest one. Accrued at different rates but I think about 1/70 per year. Work there for 30 years and retire with a salary of about 45% of salary over career term. For example if your salary is 80k, your retirement salary would be circa 38k + state pension til death

Final salary pensions were done away with ages ago though. I've been in the civil service for about 12 years and I think only my first year of servoce was final salary before the new schemes came in and we were forced to move over.

The Civil Service is massive and all depts are different (I've worked for a fair few) flexibility is generally the only perk and it isn't promised. Some dept's I worked in offered no flexibility at all, others lots.

The best bit is plenty of opportunity to move about.

Extremely slow and bureaucratic
Big teams doing not a lot
Often work replicated by other departments and organisations, so quite literally paper being pushed around
They don’t have a high performance culture in any way and it totally disincentives drive
Found it suffocating. When you can’t describe what your job is and what impact it has, it’s so demoralising and eventually you slow down to fit in with the rest as what’s the point in swimming against the tide?

I worked there for 3 months and couldn’t get out fast enough. I took a pay cut for longer working hours (graduate private sector job), really just needed something more stimulating. Now I make more than I would if I’d stayed and still spend more time at work but am massively more motivated and fulfilled.

Might be different in other departments but it was very pronounced where I was.

Civil Service, small department here (and not a particularly controversial one either!)

Perks:

We are a homeworking first dept, the flexibility in this is the best I have ever had in my working life. (Its a department that wins a lot of flexible working awards in parenting groups/circles).

Pension: I think its exceptional, seems to be consensus its a good one in my family.

Development: I know this is personal to each person and department, but I have had amazing support in development in my career - all my managers have been great in this dept, and have given me budget for qualifications I could use elsewhere, private and public sector.

Cons:

Pay. I think at the lower levels, pay is good, in my area at least (i live in a town where incomes are low), as it creeps up the grades pay is not competitive with private sector and constantly subjected to pay freezes. Little room for negotiation at lower/mid levels.

Institutionalisation: Lots of folks who are lifer civil servants and stuck in their ways. Not so many where I am now, but they are in every department in my experience.

Slow moving: getting anything done at pace is a nightmare and sometimes frustrating.

Depends on the team and the department that you work for- pay varies massively even between the departments for the same grades.
Job security is good. Also how easy it is to change roles if the one you are in doesn't work.
Flexi is good- most places are super flexible.
There's also loads of training opportunities - especially if you have a supportive manager.
Red tape, how slow everything is, the dreadful tech, the impossibility to change anything for the better, lifers, constantly being berated for not doing enough by the higher ups, without being provided with the staff and the right tools is soul destroying.

I too would like to hear about the perks.

Civil Servant in another Country. Responsibility for climate policy so very political and fast moving and pressurised. I have worked across a number of different Departments so have gained vast policy and governance experience. Qualified as an Accountant and all costs were paid for. The range of areas I have gotten to experience has been brilliant and the opportunity for promotion has been great too. Luckily my pension is defined benefit and calculated on final salary, but that has changed for more recent entrants. I have lots of interaction with the political system but also engagement with citizens.

The dedicated civil servants I know get frustrated being the target of lazy journalists and politicians trying to deflect attention from themselves.

My DH is a civil servant. His role is poorly paid but v. flexible. He works p/t and term-time only. He had a very long (unpaid) career break when DS was a baby, so he was able to be a SAHD and then return to a different department. He was WFH part of the week pre-pandemic and this will be ongoing for him.

My work pays better and is (arguably) a bit more interesting, but I'm subject to rigid scheduling, no control over my own time and my employer has cheerfully let better staff than me go rather than accommodate p/t or family-friendly hours over the years. There is nepotism: you are more likely to get what you need if the right manager likes you, and of course this also happens in the CS.

It is no exaggeration to say that I wouldn't have been able to work without the flexibility the CS gave us, and I fully intend to thank them when I leave my current job and say goodbye to everyone

I will almost certainly try to get into the CS myself in the next few years. I am 46 and have been doing the same job for the last 15 years. I'd like flexitime and I need an employer who won't automatically dismiss me due to ageism or assume that I'm a dud because I am not ambitious.

DWP taken on as a work coach in Covid after losing 3 businesses and always been self employed -well where do I start 😬 inept organisation dreadful inept management with not a GCSE is business amongst them I would wager total lack of urgency the IT is a complete joke and no training resulting in me having a filing system which others may know as deletion no one has asked me about any email they have sent for 8 months. There were 23000 work coaches taken on less that 10000 remain it’s a dreadful organisation on a positive you don’t need to do alot can get away with doing nothing money is ok flexi time of which you’re in charge of your own is good other staff some are ok sadly not my office which is terminally dreadful and I can honestly say I am completely fucked off and a shadow of who I was

I’m a civil servant - one of the big departments. I’ve worked there over 20yrs and I’ll never leave. It’s very family friendly, I work flexi time so lots of flexibility to start early / late depending on what’s happening. Never missed a sports day or assembly. We work at home 2-3 days a week (permanently). AL is good, 25 days plus bank holidays, 30 days after 10yrs. Up to 3 days flexi if you’re full time. The pension is obviously a bonus (around 1/3 of salary plus lump sum).
Negatives - it’s notoriously hard to get rid of people who take the p, either with constant sick leave or lazy. The pay is ok I think but compared to private sector not so much but have to balance that against the good pension. It had a bad reputation which is very annoying as I work so hard then you read comments that civil servants all sit watching TV all day. We have worked every day of the pandemic, no furlough for us and it’s been busier than ever due to covid / other world events