An employer is me!

An employer is me!

I had my first job interview the other day – on the other side of the desk, I mean. It was an invaluable experience… one I wish I’d had 20 years ago. It was both comforting and horrifying – comforting because I realised the crap-shoot element of the interview: you could be the nicest person in the world (all the people we interviewed were lovely), and answer the questions really well, and still not get it because it’s a numbers game and the person who did get it had just a bee’s dick more insight than you. (Of course, this is also horrifying – I don’t like gambling at the best of times, and especially not with my income.)

The horrifying element was just how much we as interviewers didn’t really have our shit together. We interviewed five people and our learning curve took place over the three hours that we did the interviews. In the public service everything is supposed to be standardised to make it fair for applicants – a principle I wholeheartedly support, speaking as a mildly autistic weirdo. But the resemblance between the first and the last interview was pretty remote  as we realised that the questions we’d chosen from public service boilerplate would be easier for candidates if we rephrased it a bit.

The other thing was that we chose our second candidate as soon as we interviewed her. As soon as she walked out the door my boss and I looked at each other and went “Her”. So all the other people were interviewed under the shadow of Super Girl – I like to believe I was interviewing with an open mind, but it was really “I’m in love, and now you have to prove you’re better than Super Girl”.

I wonder if there’s any lesson to be had here about interview times? If your recruitment agent or prospective boss offers you a swathe of interview times on the same day, should you take the very first one, in the hope of making an impression that will overshadow all who follow? Or should you take the last one of the day, hoping that the interviewers will have worked out how to get the most useful information out of their victims?

I met a goal!

I met a goal!

That may not seem like much to you, but for the first time in my life, I’m in a position where I’ve actively researched, targeted and used my networks to gain a job. Previously I’d always fallen into a position with relatively little knowledge of what was involved, motivated mainly by a need for money and a desire to have a job, any job. More recently this has been “any job that isn’t shitkicker for Toenail Branch at the Dept of Silly Walks”, which led me to the interesting but not too successful stint described in recent posts.

I’d become quite depressed in the previous role – partly because I wasn’t doing very well at it, but also because I couldn’t see any way to a better position. What further education should I do? Is there anything that even interests me? I had a mini- meltdown at my desk, and was rescued by exec assistants bearing tea and biscuits (I love youse guys). They suggested urban planning, which does interest me, but triggers my commitment-phobia – I really, really like keeping things open-ended. Not that that’s why I have a liberal arts degree – that’s just another example of falling into a situation without any planning.

But I’m currently employed in our Not Stepping On The Cracks In Case The Bears Get You branch. I’ve been grilling people from Bears branch for months now, asking them about their day job, how they got here, what the branch does and so on. The position became available because the person in it got promoted, and when I came down for the handover I realised I’d already met him at a function for our clients, which I’d attended to learn more about our crack-avoiding activities. So it was quite exciting to see how all my loose ends were tying together.

Even better, I got the position because I literally wandered around my office saying “you want policy officer? I got briefs and corro and MS Project.” One of our exec assistants (a different one to my knights with tea and biscuits) heard of this at the same time that Andy got kicked upstairs, and left me a post it note with his phone number on my monitor. The rest is yahda yahda yahda. Yes, I have given her a box of Godiva. Be nice to your secretaries! They know where the bodies are buried, and whether they hide pirate treasure.

it’s a learning experience

My secondment as a project officer is coming to an end, and I return to Toenail branch within a couple of weeks. I’m trying to keep my spirits up by reminding myself that, with the complete lack of important work to do, I’ll be free to look for more career-oriented jobs, and it’s MUCH easier to go to interviews WITHOUT the stench of desperation that comes with being unemployed.

Still, it’s hard to view this as a “learning experience”, even though that’s clearly what it was. I learnt that our large and diverse department has highly fragmented policy, with many units who are semi-coordinated. I learnt that the “policy” section struggles for relevance in this environment, given that individual units can pretty much tell it to get stuffed. Having said that, I haven’t worked in enough other divisions to realize how they might use our “services”.

What I mostly learned is that I really don’t get along well with Statements. You know the ones – Adverb Conjunction Noun Colon Policy Area Statement. Just once, I’d like to see a government release a Statement that says “we will slash productivity, ban exports and ship jobs overseas”. They’d last two seconds but at least it would be a change from bipartisan motherhood faff. (Ironically, there’s a fantastic job being advertised at the moment managing, you guessed it, a Statement. It’s a pay grade above my ability and I’m gnashing my teeth because I know I *could* do it… if it was at my current pay grade.)

So, I need to get into some program delivery. I hear rumors that there’ll be a bucketload of money thrown at the boondocks (there always is, but there’ll be MORE) and they’ll need people to roll it out. In the meantime, I’m feeling unqualified and helpless because I don’t have, and can’t easily get, any kind of qualifications in specialized areas. To make matters worse, I have an alarming tendency to flit from idea to idea like a bumblebee in a sea of daisies. Oooh, courts policy! Oooh, urban planning! Oooooh, gambling regulation! None of which I have any expertise in, and none of which are likely to sustain my interest enough to get a degree in or any bulk of expertise.

Help me out here – am I being utterly precious? Is there a cadre of public service units screaming out for people with enthusiasm and rolled-up sleeves but no particular expertise? It strikes me that being a specialist would be fab up to a certain point of middle management, after which you’d have to go generalist again if you wanted to climb any further.

Mentoring

I put my hand up for the Department’s mentoring program recently. They’ve matched me up with someone a couple of levels above me and working in an area that I’ve been interested in, which should at least allow me to check out exactly how green that grass is.

I’ve had… interesting experiences with mentoring. The first was cross-departmental group mentoring. The idea was, four new hires from completely different departments would be matched with a senior executive from yet another department. I guess the idea was that we’d have fertile cross-pollination of ideas and viewpoints. In practice, we had one meeting where the executive, a nice enough guy, spouted platitudes and bragged about his golf handicap. Not long after our one and only meeting, he was sacked/left under a cloud because his staff basically stole every single phone, laptop, PDA, pager, radio, stick drive, Sticky Note and stick of charcoal that wasn’t actually in his hands at the time. Basically, if you could communicate with it they stole it. I hear a few blankets and bundles of kindling went missing.

My next encounter with mentoring was through a professional association, and could be considered anti-mentoring. At first, I fell head over heels in love, as I have a bad habit of doing – “OMG we’re like TWINS!!1!”. Unfortunately, the main benefit of this experience was unintentional. I’d asked the mentor to help me with my professional conduct – the fact is that while I have a few very close friends, I’m widely considered obnoxious, which is why I’m a junior public servant despite being in early middle age.

This turned out to be the one thing my mentor absolutely would NOT help me with. Happy to tell me what I should eat, buy, rent, wear, etc, but not to help me with my one specific goal for the mentoring. It was didactic, condescending… and obnoxious. The lesson learned was “holy shit – people think I’M like that??1!?”. Which, to be fair, is an extremely valuable lesson.

I’m currently reading First Impressions: What You Don’t Know About How Others See You, by Ann Demarais and Valerie White. It’s extremely good in that it breaks down into very basic components the factors that make people like you (and the converse). It’s like the parts of speech – you use the building blocks all the time, but you use them more effectively when you know what they are. The best part of them being building blocks, of course, is that you can choose the ones you need.

Links of (Lotus) Note

I’d like to think that my non-posting habit is related to being hardworking and busy, but it’s not – I’m lazy and tired and prioritising going to the gym over writing. Going to the gym has to be done, of course, but I have to THINK OF MY CAREER!!`!!1! In the meantime, here’s some interesting public-sector related links.

Public Sector Blog

Google’s official Public Sector Blog discusses tools for both election campaigns and public administration. This post on Web Analytics emphasises the importance of asking the right questions of your website visitors and making it easy for them to give feedback.

The Public Administration Collective

A collective of public policy blogs from the UK and US, ranging from news and opinion to management theory.

Synopsis

A blog of politics and policy by a Masters student at Holy Angel University in the Philippines. Some of it’s a bit dense and clearly entry-level, but that may be exactly what you need.

Whitehall Watch

British politics and civil service blog by a Professor of Public Policy & Management at the Manchester Business School. His area of interest is in performance measurement (we call it evaluation out here in the boonies), so be warned, may not be suitable for beginners. I actually think meaningful performance measurement is of paramount importance, but jebus it’s boring.

Public

The newsletter of the Institute of Public Governance & Management at Ramon Llull University in Barcelona. I’ve linked to the English version, but it’s also available in Catalan. I have to admit to being particularly intrigued by the suggestion that “[t]he willingness of public sector workers and managers to accept lower pay in return for … a more meaningful or enjoyable job translates into lower returns on talent in the public sector compared to the private sector.”

Undercover Economist

I’m not an economist. I work in an economic development agency. IT HURRRRRRRRTS. This blog is less painful than economics usually is.

Charting Transport

Are you a graph nerd? Close the door for some furtive one-handed browsing of this impressive collection of visual analysis of just about everything in public transport in Australia – demand growth, drivers of use, fare structures, travel data… talk nerdy to me!

Citizen Ugly – your workplace and mine

Games about the public service are usually lame. This is an unusually hard-hitting documentary.

http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/game_player/index.jhtml?game=266314

An atheist in a foxhole

Yes Minister meets Alice in Wonderland, Myles Peterson

This piece did ring a few bells with me. I would however like to raise a couple of points:

Our section was under-budget by hundreds of thousands of dollars, necessitating we blow all the unspent money before the end of the financial year. Unfortunately, ”training” did not mean I would finally get some training. ”Training” consisted of hastily booked, dubiously relevant conferences and courses, most of which were conveniently located a long way from Canberra.

Nice work if you can get it – my department is cracking down on employee travel even though we have the same amount of spare budget. We won’t waste your valuable taxpayer dollars on sending lowly public drones to the only place they can get specialised training! (I’m not bitter.)

We were not the only ones wasting money. Associated with our section were those boffins who create public health campaigns, the ones that appear on television with increasing regularity: nights out turning into nightmares, measure your fat stomach, wash your hands – that kind of thing.

I was surprised to discover the minds behind these campaigns were not health professionals. They had backgrounds and degrees in marketing, communications and advertising, not medicine.

This is actually pretty reasonable! When was the last time you changed your behaviour because of a fact? OK, a heart attack is technically a fact, but a health professional isn’t ethically allowed to actually induce a heart attack or emphysema, so they tend to say uncompelling things like “the prevalence ratio of Type II Diabetes in overweight and moderately obese women is 3x that of normal-weight women” (closer investigation revealing that the prevalence is less than 8%, so 92% of overweight and moderately obese women don’t actually have this problem).

Hence it falls to the marketing bods to come up with ever gorier images of your heart or lungs turning black under the influence of your lazy, filthy day-to-day abuse, in the vain hope that you will actually wake up and realise that incremental changes to your lifestyle really do help. I lost over 50lb, not after being informed that obesity will shave 3.6 years off my already-likely-to-be-90+ life,  but because I was the oldest, fattest slob in a graduate intake of spunky young things whose mere existence made me grind my teeth with jealousy. Could those boffins who create public health campaigns could convey that in a 15-second spot?

Print out and keep

http://www.youmightlikethis.com/2010/02/your-path-to-happiness/

In which my nose is only a light shade of camel – a case study in networking

Many good things have happened here at the Ministry of Silly Walks.

In the darkest days of my Shuffling Drone-dom, a god-like hand reached into my black pit of despair and offered me a band-aid position covering for an AWOL employee (“he went mad and we shot him”). A job in a real actual Minister’s office! Paid at the Mumbling Troglodyte level! Working next to real actual policy! It was like those old wives’ tales about how if you sit at the end of the aisle in the cinema a drug dealer will come along and inject you with heroin and you’ll get addicted. Except good, and except it actually happened.

And, OK, not the most flattering way to get a job – I was only approached because the 27 other people they asked didn’t want to do it, and then I got the job because no-one else was available. But it got me out of Toenail Branch – so called because it’s dead skin and likely to be cut off soon –  and into the central nervous system. I was finally working with the people who actually decide what Silly Walks does and how it will do it, from the Minister herself  down to my fellow Mumbling Troglodytes. The fact that I had no idea what I was doing, had barely touched a brief since the end of my graduate rounds and knew almost no-one in my Ministry would be no obstacle to success!!!

… which, of course, it was. My knowledge of procedure was not only extremely poor, but so poor that I struggled to crowbar it all into my tiny brain, making some fairly egregious errors. Not all of them were my fault, of course – at least one was because of a rather violent disagreement between the Minister’s staff and the policy branch over mailroom procedures which I’m still too traumatised to talk about. But ultimately I had to interview for the position, and although the interview went about as well as they ever do for me, they decided not to give me the role. The manager of the Ministerial support branch advised me that staff members “said when they were giving you instructions you looked like you weren’t listening. And then you did it wrong.” Not a ringing endorsement.

The upside of this rather intense experience was that I got to polish my Networking skillz – not a skill that comes naturally to me the way, say, important research points embedded in 800-page non-digitised tomes come up and start eating out of my hand. Because of this unnaturalness, I had to be pretty calculating – I basically identified the most common names on the briefs that were coming in, called the extension number listed and said “Hi, my name’s Grace Forthright and I’m your Ministerial Support Mole. Would you like to do coffee and tell me all about everything your branch does?”

For the most part, this was a fairly successful strategy. It helped me understand the arcane information reaching my desk, which I was supposed to help clean up before it reached the Minister. It enabled me to understand what the hell Silly Walks actually does, what its structure is, how it interacts with other departments, and how I can get free tickets to fun things because Silly Walks provides funding for activities such as pogoing and Calvinball.

When I didn’t get the job, I returned to Toenail Branch. I diligently performed my duties, which involved arranging tea-parties, folding origami dancers and replacing photocopier cartridges. I cried myself to sleep at night, masturbating furiously (in the public service we call it “insourcing”) and dreaming of a role that would justify the $25K worth of student loans looming over my head.

And I continued the networking. I spoke to anyone who would catch up with me, and then I asked them who else would be willing to talk to me. And I found out all sorts of fun stuff about Silly Walks, and our extensive Vertical Folkdancing section, and Pogoing, and Not Stepping On The Cracks In Case The Bears Get You. I applied for jobs in these areas, meeting the policy officers who worked in my area of interest. I grilled my friends in internal departments about how to interview and how to get around the fact that I know very little about pogoing or vertical folkdancing.

And it paid off, in a rather odd way. Suffice to say I now have another band-aid position in our central policy branch. When I started I already knew several of my cow-orkers through my diligent coffee meetings or other job interviews. It’s a temporary position, but hopefully it’s my ticket out of Toenail.

Plea for advice: When you’re the lowest of the low

The other day I wrote about working on a doomed project. It’s not a worthless project – it’s about improving services, always a worthy aim – but for various political reasons not able to be mentioned here, its future is already limited. 

But pretend for the sake of argument that it’s not to meet an untimely demise soon, because I think it’s good to improve services. I am the most junior person involved with this project. We hired a contractor for a sum that is just shy of the amount where we would need to get our purchasing unit involved ($100,000.00). This contractor has done the project that THEY wanted, not the one we wanted. They were hired to undertake some internal research for us, and when I received copies of the proposed research in my email, I immediately identified that there were some problems, which I brought up with our divisional director. The director thanked me and wrote back to the contractor to advise some changes. In the meantime, some additions were made to the project, which *should* have required changing the marketing and management of the research to correctly target the new stakeholders. This was not done, so the new stakeholders were being spammed with requests for information appropriate only to the original stakeholders. Quite rightly, the new stakeholders were not that interested! 

To make matters worse, the original stakeholder management was… poor. We did not do the work of getting the support of the higher levels of management of the stakeholders we were asking to help us, and unsurprisingly, these people were anything from unsure if they should co-operate with us to outright hostile at being approached directly. My immediate manager was complicit in this as she sent spam emails to the new stakeholders that did not differentiate in their language from the spam emails sent to the original stakeholders. Did I mention we spammed our stakeholders? 

So, we’ve got a project that no-one from the most senior management down to the most junior shit-shoveller (ie me) believes in, where the groundwork of people management hasn’t been done, and where we’re doing acts I find morally reprehensible (spam). I have mentioned my concerns to my oboemaphone-playing HR person, who said “Did you say something to your manager?” And the answer is no, I did not, because I did not feel that I could do so or that I would be listened to. You wanna know what I did? 

I hid. 

I put off doing my tasks (like calling stakeholders to ask why they haven’t answered our spam… uh, because it’s spam, maybe?), did them in a half-arsed way, avoided them, and just plain didn’t do them. 

That’s probably not the professional approach to take in this situation. One day I will be in a job interview where I am asked “Tell us about a time where you identified a problem, and talk us through the way you solved it”, and I’m going to freeze up because I’ll remember this project and say “I hid”. 

What have you done in this situation? What could I have done to change anything? Anyone about to write “You should have spammed the people just like you were told to do” should keep in mind that one day I’m going to be interviewed by one of the people I’ve spammed, and they’re going to say polite words to the effect of  “I remember you… your project sent us that bullshit survey spam and kicked up a stink when we told you to get stuffed”.