Are public sector managers unemployable?
A new survey of small business owners, the overwhelming majority of SMEs take a very dim view indeed of former-public sector staff, with a mere two per cent saying they would actively seek to recruit public sector workers and almost a quarter only hiring them if they couldn't find anyone else for the job. Just over one in ten said they would not take on a public sector worker at all, whatever the circumstances.
Apparently this is down to the creation of a culture in the public sector of indulgence and unrealistic expectations of the workplace.
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Dunno about unemployable but there is a PR issue around public sector managers as not being particularly enterprising, which I think is something many SMEs will be looking for. It's up to those individuals to sell themselves in properly, assuming of course they would even consider a job with a SME.
Surely this is just another example of the modern fashion for bashing the public sector. Public sector workers are just ordinary people with the same abilities as anyone else. Many people in the public sector have worked in the private sector and many leave to work in the private sector, you take work where you can find it. As the last poster said it should be all about your performance in the selection process and the skills you have. Limiting the prospective candidates for any job in this way seems counter-productive to me
The statistics indicate that the public sector manager will be 'up against it' once ejected from their public sector role. However, I believe there is considerable talent in the public sector that could add value to any organisation. It depends on whether potential employers in the private sector will drop any preconceived ideas about the public sector worker and conduct recruitment in a fair and objective manner. Dropping virtually all the CVs from public sector applicants in the bin is a missed opportunity in my view to tap into a broader pool of talent. The former public sector worker could offer, for example, considerable insight into systems and processes that could improve efficiency and effectiveness in a small to medium enterprise. Even if this means avoiding some of the systems or processes adopted by the public sector.
It’s an interesting if not unfortunate dilemma. It will depend on the entry level for the potential new employee but all in all public sector managers are far more formally qualified than many of their SME counterparts. I hate to suggest it, but is there a certain amount of stigma associated with that.
Certainly I would expect public service managers to come from a more regimented and process driven environment that may not necessarily be seen as a value to the more entrepreneurial small business.
I would expect large business to pick up here and certainly consulting would suit many.
Wesley
There does seem to be unfair prejudice towards public-sector workers especially where unionised workforces have attracted a lot of negative press with much reported changes to working conditions being the forefront of conflict. There are many good and capable managers in the public-sector delivering excellent service which 'Jo-public' takes for granted and very loudly complain about if reduced.
I share Wesleys view that regimented process driven managers may not be valued by entrepreneurial SME's nevertheless, there are gems to be found within the public-sector - it really depends what skills you are looking for and where you are looking. The value to the employer is locked in the person, therefore excluding a large group of individuals reduces the diversity and size of the selection pool making it harder to recruit the 'right' person. Robust recruitment processes should deliver the right person regardless of background.
Having come into the public sector about 8 years ago from 30 years in a variety of SMEs, I have to say that in my experience public sector managers are of no less quality; indeed, many of them display a level of commitment to the role of their organisation that the private sector could do well to emulate.
When we talk about "regimented process driven managers" in the public sector, we need to recognise that it isn't the managers themselves that are process driven, it's the regime in which they have to work. Because we are sprending public money, there is a greal deal of emphasis on 'due diligence' and on ensuring that these expenditures are justifiable, and that we are adhering to government policies. All of this results in processes that require to be followed.
I agree with Jim. I came from a public sector background, and there is a stigma attached to it. It is through ignorance and believing in the stories about public sector workers i.e. they are lazy.
Public sector managers are very often highly qualified professionally and academically. The problem they face is they have to work within a political/governmental environment. Such environment places great constraints on creativity, flair, and decision making. So what ends up happening is that they become compliant managers and don't challenge the status quo because they know that they are on a loser.
When I left public sector it was like my life began again. I can make my own decisions, I can be as creative I want and its fantastic. Its a shame that public sector employees are not allowed such freedom. I feel for them.
Some thoughts on this from our LinkedIn group:
Vince Pizzoni:
No, they are not unemployable. As has been said earlier it is up to the individual to show a prospective new employer what they can deliver to them and their background should not negate their transferable skills.
Lesley, in your case I would be talking to my manager about career development opportunities and what I needed to do to open these up. You've probably done this already.
Vince
Steve Trivett:
In my experience many public sector managers do not want to be managers. They take management jobs because it is often their only opportunity for promotion. Managers in public service are also constrained in what training or coaching they can offer their staff. If as Vince says Lesley, your manager is unable to support your career development, then seek redeployment or look for work that will take you in the direction you want to go. If you are not clear what your skills and aptitudes will allow you to do, then explore what skills you will need to achieve your career goals. The worst thing you can do is stop where you are. This will only suggest to potential employers that you lack ambition and don't know what you have to offer
More progressive public services offer competency based personal development schemes linked to performance, but in the context of single status and the current financial climate you may have to fund them yourself. Another option is to consider distance learning to support your professional development.
Another option is to consider approaching a Career or Personal Development Coach. It might be the best investment you ever make.
Richard Pell:
There is a real tension between the perception that many SMEs have of public sector workers and managers and the way that public sector managers will perceive SMEs.
As always, some of the generalisations will be true in some of the cases but not all. The real tragedy would be for all public sector managers to be ignored by SMEs as a matter of course - some of these managers will be real stars who will relish working outside of some of the constraints they have experienced.
It is also true that some will be temperamentally totally unsuited to an SME environment.
Open minds will help and digging down for skills matches will also work wonders. There remains the problem that SMEs will almost certainly not offer terms and conditions of employment that are anywhere near as favourable as those in the public sector.
George Kemish:
I am in total agreement with Richard. Whilst some of the generalisations will be true in some cases, there a lot of managers in the public sector who would have no trouble in transferring to the private sector and, in doing so, would bring value to an organisation. Unfortunately the Public Sector would appear to have attracted a stigma that in some cases is unfounded. I would be the first to agree that there are managers in the public sector who have failed to keep pace with changes both to management techniques and also in best practice within their chosen profession. However, there are many others who have made great strides in trying to improve processes to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. I have no doubt that there are managers employed by some SMEs who might not match the experience and skills of some of those employed in the Public Sector. I also feel that, having to work to some of the constraints experienced in the Pulbic Sector can be an advantage, especially budgetary constraints! Like Richard I would recommend that everyone keep an open mind and treat each applicant as an individual, rather than 'tar everyone with the same brush'.
Cristos Monoyios:
Public sector managers in contrast with private sector managers I would say that sometimes they might have more oppportunities for employment but in reality when it comes to skills i believe that they lacking this.
I will refer to this as a matter of cultural diversity existing in everycountry and especially governmental bodies are different. In most cases these bodies provide a sense of security in addition to a high paid job. So what happens, is that after they get the position, the challenges are at a minimal level and levels of motivation are quite low.
Another issue that this exists is the conflict between politicians and really inspirational leaders and managers. The political environment prevents such behaviour that will enable individuals to grow to their full potential along with managers to develop their managerial skills.
Concluding, yes, there are some people that are quite hard working motivated individuals but I'd say for the majority of us say that managers in the public sector have differences from those in the private, in terms of motivation and real life experience
The burden is up to us to judge,
Thanks,
Chris M.
Lesley Sinclair:
I would agree that there is a general perception out there that public sector managers are not has robust or perhaps capable as say a manager in the private sector. Having worked in both areas, I find this one quite difficult to understand. Transferable skills are that, transferable and perhaps the challenge for individuals is having the confidence to identify, articulate and sell your skills and unique selling point to prospective employers. It is an employers market at the moment however if you have the confidence and self belief in what you can do, what you have done and how your transferable skills with benefit your next employer I do not see major hurdles in shifting over into another business sector.
Mervyn Phipps:
Interesting debate
I have worked in the public sector since leaving school in the seventies and have many friends and netrworking colleagues in the private sector. The management skills and expertise required within the public sector is the same as that for a wide range of private sector businesses. I am a firm believer in tranferrable skills and have seen this happen within the NHS, my current employer.
I agree with some of the comments that it is fashionable to knock public sector employees based on tabloid prejudices however the truth, in general, is somewhat different. Long hours, competing demands, difficult to achieve targets,high levels of stess, lack of job security - am I talking about the public sector of private sector??
You choose!
Alan Wingrove:
There are two issues here:
The perception of the public sector
How managers from this sector market themselves when moving to another sector
The perception of the public sector is caused by politicians. For years the government in power (irrespective of which one) have been bleating on about how much money they have put into health, the police and education. These speeches were perceived as good vote catchers, without telling the public that this was all being done on borrowed money.
In recent years they have been caught out and have had to admit that the UK is in a dire financial position. As a consequence we have now heard about how inefficient the public sector is and that it is too bureaucratic– from the same politicians that created these problems in the first place.
Criticism of public sector leadership can be easily traced to times when the public sector was under-resourced. Every time there was an inquiry into a critical incident that had gone wrong, whether it was a failed investigation by the police, the death of a child under the care of Social Services or a preventable death in a hospital, instead of acknowledging that leaders were doing their best with the resources they had, it was easier to blame ‘poor leadership’. We were told that ‘lessons would be learned to prevent this happening again’ (until the next time!)
The solution was to advocate leaders coming in from the private sector to 'teach' the public sector how things should be done and there should be more layers of management monitoring public sector performance. Consequently inordinate amounts of quango organisations were created to inspect the performance of the public sector, which have managed to choke it instead.
Unfortunately, people have believed this rhetoric, including private sector employers, and the real tragedy is that many very good leaders in the public sector have felt undermined and ‘rubbished’ by this rhetoric, which leads me to the second issue.
I have coached senior leaders from the public sector who will do excellently in the private sector if they can just learn to use commercial language to market their transferable skills. However, they first have to overcome the damage this political rhetoric has inflicted and recognise their own value; which is immense.
Are there poor leaders in the public sector? Yes.
Are there poor leaders in the private sector? Yes.
Are there poor leaders in the third sector? Yes.
There are, equally, really good leaders in each but, are there people 'rubbishing' public sector leadership who should know better? Most definitely!
I am extremely proud to work in the public sector where I have to be creative, imaginative and entrepreneurial in the way I challenge, influence and manage change. I recently applied for a job in the private sector and my CV was described as 'institutionalised'. Sadly, I believe this is not the fault of my CV but a stereotypical view of some in the private sector. The managers I have working through CMI level 3 and 5 management standards are certainly not 'lazy, pen-pushing, process driven bureaucrats' but visionary, people and customer focused with an ability to make a little money go a very long way. Aren't these competencies vital for working in any sector??
I find these broad generalisations and stereotypes quite amazing. When we talk of the 'public sector' - do we mean employees from local authorities,the health service, doctors or nurses, the police, Army, RAF, Navy, Civil Service, fire service, the Foreign Office, ......
These are all public sector workers. So when SMEs do not want to employ public sector workers - look at the range of people and skills they are missing out on.
This aversion to processes and systems in my experience- is often an aversion to being held accountable for those areas of legislation, policy and procedure - which are 'in the too difficult tray' to implement or are seen as 'not essential' - or 'over the top' - that allows lack of care of staff or working practices that would be challenged in the public sector.
Hello Elizabeth. Would you mind if I looked at your CV and if I can help in any way I will? Please forward to vpizzoni@preng.com.
I too am amazed at the generalisations and stereotyping that occurs.
And we have the CV review thread here if anyone wants to get some good feedback on their CV
http://www.managers.org.uk/forum/new-managers/cv-review-thread
As someone who has worked in the public sector all my working life I was very worried initially on reading this report. But as many of you have pointed out it depends on the person, their skills and how they pitch themselves.
Like many others I am “at risk” of redundancy and for the first time find myself having to compile a CV. I am making sure everything in it is tangible and highlights, performance, outcomes and savings on projects I have worked on. Writing it with the private sector in mind instead of the public sector.
It will be another chapter in life and work and just the fact of writing what skills I have and what I have achieved in a different format has actually made me think of looking seriously at the private sector.
On the question of whether public sector managers are unemployable or not there are many good and bad managers in both public and private sectors. The good managers in each sector use different skill sets often to achieve similar outcomes by different methods.
It has been seen over the years that many managers cross both sectors successfully which once again comes back to individual skill and knowledge building. Maybe if through this particular recession more public sector managers end up in the private sector it may dispel some of those perceptions that public sector is bad and private sector is good.
Thomas, if you want any help reviewing your CV I would be happy to do.
Thanks, Vince
Vince that's a kind offer. I am on holiday shortly for a couple of weeks but will contact you on my return. Thanks Tom
Interesting report from ILM showing that public sector managers are the least trusted.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/public-leaders-network/blog/2011/oct/06/public-sector-managers-trust-survey-results?newsfeed=true
"On ability, public sector bosses scored and average of 67 points based on the ILM's scoring system – five points less than private and third sector managers in similar positions.
But it's the large public sector organisations (those with more than 1,000 employees) that deserve most cause for concern, the report concludes, with chief executives scoring only 55 points for trust overall – seven points behind similar-sized organisation in the private sector and 11 points fewer than those in the third sector.
Central, local government and health organisations had the lowest levels of trust for their chief executives, scoring 52 and 57 respectively, while education chief executives scored 55, displaying a year-on-year decrease in trust – the only public sector area to do so."
It's interesting also that senior executives score lowest in terms of trust compared to other levels of management.
It would be interesting to have a more accurate picture of these stats rather than the broad generalisation of 'the large public sector organisations'. What are the scores for those managers from the Armed Services, the Police, MOD, Prison Service, etc?
With reference to the article from the Guardian cited earlier... http://www.guardian.co.uk/public-leaders-network/blog/2011/oct/06/public-sector-managers-trust-survey-results?newsfeed=true I would like to add, that the tenor of this report appears to be aimed at senior management or Chief Executives in the public sector rather than managers in general. I agree with comments above, that it can be too easy to make generalisations...
I wonder about the validity of a lot of these surveys. I very much doubt they would pass academic muster.
This is a complex one, but I have to say, after having worked for a public sector employer that I was often astounded at the disregard for good management practice that was allowed amongst managers in the organisation I worked for. 'I don't need to learn I have done the same job for 20 years' was a common statement - almost a mantra. In one striking example, there was a stress related suicide and an enforced HSE stress audit, and the manager I reported to tried to block the audit, then spent a great deal of his time and effort exhorting people junior to him to pick holes in the audit process so that he could resist implementing any of their guidelines. The same senior manager refused to do annual reviews for his staff, myself included (though I substituted quasi 360 reviews for myself by meeting senior colleagues and keeping my own monitoring figures).
I often challenged this position, even offering to take on the responsibility for ensuring annual reviews were completed (because I see this as the basic minimum for good management) but was told that 'local autonomy' was more sacrosanct than good practice or global standards.
I would fight shy of generalising completely, since many at my level (sub senior/middle) had very high expectations of good organisational behaviour, but I would question very closely someone who had held a senior position for some time and had not participated in constant professional growth and development.
One thing I think is taught well in some areas of the public sector is the use of politics head of actual performance. If I were recruiting a manager from an institution/organisation where reporting and monitoring skills were low, and the interview was full of stories, but lacked evidence I would be cautious. If I knew that I was recruiting someone from an area of the public sector with high accountability, monitoring and performance guidelines and the interview was balanced with evidence and performance figures I would be more reassured.
I would also look for variation - as a very rough personal experience, those managers who had never left their institution, or indeed work area were much less flexible and had weaker communications skills than those who had moved around a lot - in my institution, those who had stayed in one work area often had higher salaries and status than those who had moved, which I think is indicative of some of the core problems in the culture of some large areas of the public sector.
Re Elizabeth's 'proud' post above (which I hope is ironic.. but if not..) your post is so buzzwordy it is the perfect illustration of 'the style/storytelling over substance' problem I mention in my above post eg you forgot to say ' I go the extra mile' or 'going forward' -perhaps you don't want to go near the dangerous stuff but that post wouldn't encourage me to employ you.
I have a friend who has just left the public sector and got a job in a private sector company. She sent me an email saying she was shocked to find that in her new job she wasn't allowed to use Facebook on the work computer, she wasn't allowed to make private phone calls in work time and she wasn't allowed to send private emails from work !!!! Worse still, she was shocked to find that she didn't have flexi-working hours.
I think this just about sums it all up.
I am heartened by some of the comments supporting public sector workers - based upon actual experience. Having served for 6 years in HM Forces and 14 years for the Police Service I have worked with many talented people who make critical decisions under extreme pressure on a daily basis to protect the public and interests of our country.
A recent Hays Report on Transition from Public to Private sector suggests that (surprise surprise) there are generalisations and steretypes from staff in both sectors. It should be about transferable skills and as Alan mentions above there are poor and great leaders in ALL sectors.
Met with friends last night one completely snowed under with work and working late every night, the other outlining that she had to leave some of her work or she would have nothing to do tomorrow. Both managers, both private sector.
I have a friend who has just left the public sector and got a job in a private sector company. She sent me an email saying she was shocked to find that in her new job she wasn't allowed to use Facebook on the work computer, she wasn't allowed to make private phone calls in work time and she wasn't allowed to send private emails from work !!!! Worse still, she was shocked to find that she didn't have flexi-working hours.
I think this just about sums it all up.
Does it matter if you use Facebook at work or make private calls, or even work flexible hours, so long as the work gets done? Surely the output is the main thing?
Having recently left the Public Sector, it has to be said that there are many managers within the sector who have spent many years not pulling their weight; whilst there are also a large number of highly committed & talented individuals.
Many will be voluntarily taking redundancy over the next few years - many are too afraid of what lies outside. Some will eventualy be pushed out.
However, the huge range of skills is transferable, but managers need to have confidence and help in presenting thier achievements - and possibly help for interviews, I know I have found them daunting.
Good luck to anyone else like me who's moving on!
I'd like to echo Shelley's concern about broad generalisations. This isn't a dichotomy - it's a spectrum from core Civil Service to aggressively commercial. There are so many shades between the two that it's ridiculous to categorise individuals in one or other camp.
Back in late 2010, I wrote about the slow trickle of senior civil servants that I was seeing who were seeking to migrate from predominantly Westminster-based jobs to the 'private' sector (Astute senior civil servants dip their toes in the private sector) Then, most were proving highly attractive prospects to the major consultancies, accountancies and law firms.
Today, the level and degree of specialism seems to have dropped, but there are many organisations in the not-for-profit sector as well as the commercial one who regard very positively the disciplined, politically savvy, methodical and diplomatic civil servant.
We learned today that the CIPD is recruiting a replacement for Jackie Orme, their Chief Executive, who has had to take extended absence while being treated for cancer.
I would be more than happy to wager a fiver that her replacement will be a former public sector employee.
Best wishes
Graham Wilson - 07785 222380
executive-post.info | the-confidant.info
Having worked in, and recruited into, both public and private sector organisations I've experienced two major barriers when management candidates want to change from one sector the the other. Firstly they need to adjust thier skill set. Public sector employment often fails to develop skills in broader business activities due to the specialisation that takes place within public bodies. SME managers often need to be able to direct recruitment, manage employment relationships, finance and marketing all at the same time. These wider business skills are often not needed by public sector managers who specialise in a particular function.
I would suggest that public sector managers have more widely developed political and emotional inteligence, but these are not often recognised as adding value in the business world.There may be a case that these skills should be more valued and should be nurtured within the private sector.
The other barrier is culture. I've interviewed many ex-public sector managers who let themselves down at interview by not demonstrating the ability to evaluate situations and make decisions quickly, and then take personal responsibility for thier results. Public sector managers may make good collaborative workers but in my experience they often fail to demonstrate a willingness to evaluate and take business risks.
All this is obviously a generalisation based on my experience within the care sector. But I think the message to anyone wishing to (or forced to) move into the private sector is that they need to recognise the differences, and make those adjustments before they end up in a selection process.