Tag archives for Civil service
How will you be choosing your next boss?
Boss at Rochester Cathedral. Not the right sort as your next (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I'm now in a position of needing to choose my next boss. My loan to DCMS is nearly over, a year has flown by, mostly very enjoyable. If I had a free choice I’d be staying here, my team are excellent and we work well together. The subject matter that we’ve been dealing with is interesting too, and we’re also trying to develop material to help other officials learn from our experiences (and those of others in DCMS). However I can't stay, so I thought I would write a post about how to choose your next boss. Recruitment is Two Way Anyway, this leaves me in the place of finding another job again. So I see recruitment as a two way process. I need to want…
Getting A Civil Service Job
Today is my last day in my current civil service job. On Monday I will start a new civil service job, on promotion, with a different civil service department. 100 Parliament Street (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Figuratively, I will be at the other end of Government. Physically I'll be in Parliament Street, a five minute walk from my current building. I'll be quite sad in many ways. I've worked with some very good people on things that I've both found interesting and felt that it was improving things from a citizen perspective. I expect that to continue in my new job, just with new people and new subject areas. This is not the end of my first chapter, not is it the start of the last. I describe myself as a career civil servant, having had many civil service jobs since 1992.…
Green Ink for happier editing?
For almost two decades I have used green ink when commenting on documents and for editing. I've come to believe that green ink is the best colour for editing for a variety of reasons. Here they are. Green Ink is psychologically positive Traditionally red ink has been used for correcting proofs. Red has a negative connotation, we use it for stop signs and prohibitions. Psychologically red can symbolise the blood from our work, and if there is a lot of red on the page then we get disillusioned and dispirited. So much so that UK civil service core competency framework has "wields the red pen" as an unacceptable trait for senior civil servants. Green Ink carries the opposite connotations to red ink. We use green for go, and for affirming things. So green ink on the page doesn't carry the…
Leadership Values – How do they develop?
I'm currently in the midst of the HR component of my current Open University module (B203). It got me thinking about my leadership values and how they developed from my experiences as a leader. Young Leader My introduction to leadership came at the age of 16. As part of my Venture Scout activities I helped out with the 1st Glen Lusset cub scouts. This involved running activities for 7-10 year old boys, including teaching them how to start fires. I then went to university and became a Territorial Army Officer Cadet (at 17 and a half). My first formal leadership training was from the British Army. This training was backed up with practical experience, leading scouts and soldiers (similar outlooks, soldiers are older and have guns). This strongly shaped my leadership values. Civil Service Leadership I joined the civil service from university (after a six month…
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Nineteen Years in Public Service
Nineteen years ago I started work, at Her Majesty's pleasure according to my job offer letter, as an Executive Officer with the Department of the Environment. I was a graduate entrant on the DOE's Management Development Programme and was paid an annual salary of £12,200, including London Weighting. That was quite good money at the time, the average graduate starting salary was £10,000 and in today's terms it would be about double that (using the Retail Prices Index (RPI) to update it). The expectations that I had were of relatively rapid promotion to Higher Executive Officer (HEO) after about 3 years and then skipping past Senior Executive Officer (SEO) straight to Grade 7 in about five years after getting to HEO. I also got told that I would have compulsory retirement at the age of 60 and that I would…