Working from abroad - public sector?

[pinkmink]

Thinking about long term career prospects, I’d like to find a job that allows me to work remotely from anywhere in the world for at least a couple of months a year. I also quite like the idea of working for the public sector? Does anyone know if public sector employees are ever allowed to do this?

dB owns his own IT company and has been travelling and working around the world even before covid

Most employers don’t allow this.

If you're an ordinary grade (ie not dead wealthy and/or related to the cabinet in some way) the public sector is unlikely to let you work from Jersey, Guernsey, Sark, Alderney, or the Isle of Man, let alone proper abroad as it were. Some organisations still insist you live within daily commuting distance.

If you want to work abroad your best options would be to look for a job with a part of the civil service like the MoD (though those posts are like gold dust these days for civilians and it helps to be married to a brigadier or similar), or look for a job with an overseas branch of a university, find a commercial firm, or look into starting your own business doing something that might get you a digital nomad visa.

If you're thinking about the civil service due to job security, that's diminished dramatically in the last decade, along with that so called gold plated pension certain parts of the mainstream press regularly drivel on about!

It does seem to be a hard no for public sector, although they don’t seem to have specific guidance, just a blanket ‘no’. Private companies, Inc the one I currently work at, will alllow it within certain rules, depending on country and seem to have a much more pragmatic approach so long as you are complying with legal/tax issues. We have a lot of people tacking on extra time working from abroad in top of holidays, esp over Christmas this year.

It depends very much on the department in my experience. In certain departments you were allowed to work from abroad during the pandemic - but this was because they had family living abroad and they wanted to see this family. However was mostly Europe and when a few colleagues tried to do this with other side of the world (e.g. Aus and NZ) then mostly due to time differences this didn't work out and a few people resigned and went back to those countries.

I also know one other person in another department whose DH works and lives in a Balkan country and she regularly used to have a long weekend and WFH there and then return to UK solo. However, this may have changed since the pandemic.

There can be and probably has been a lot more issues with IT safety and not only that but viruses etc on laptops if abroad so I'm guessing a few departments probably have clamped down on this.

DH is an IT Contractor.
When is is on govt contracts he has to be within The UK