It’s easy for women in their 30s and 40s to feel stuck in the public sector at the moment. You have years of relevant experience, a relevant tertiary education qualification or even qualifications plural, and the respect of those you work with. But if the more senior job you had your eye on was cut, and advertised jobs at the level you want to move to are few and far between, what’s the solution? How do you progress your career without promotion?
The current environment in New Zealand public sector organisations and tight job market really are big obstacles. During 2025, New Zealand media outlet The Post reported in an article that it had conducted its own research into public sector restructures and found that one-third of government departments, Crown entities and non-public service organisations were in some stage of restructure. That’s a lot of structural and process upheaval, and churn of people.
It’s so frustrating. You’re super capable, committed, and keen to contribute on important work.
That’s what I’m hearing from a lot of women working in the public sector, and while it is a difficult time, for sure, there are concrete things you can do to keep your career in advancement mode. It relies on knowing why you want to progress your career, and the other options for professional development besides moving up a level in the hierarchy, and then making your progression efforts visible.
Understand why career progression matters to you
If moving up was on the cards for you right now, do you know why you’d want to do it? Obviously, an increased salary makes life easier, a more senior title looks good on your CV, and, it’s ‘just what people do’, isn’t it. But beyond that?
Reasons or motivations for career progression also include:
the satisfaction of feeling we’re improving and growing
getting closer to achieving some long-term ambition
greater meaning or significance in our work or alignment with our values
being better able to influence others in our area, or simply because
career progression is enjoyable.
Having a greater impact is a key driver to progress in our careers, and many women start feeling the drive to make a tangible difference in their 30s and 40s. To be part of something bigger than ourselves, and for public sector workers particularly, a keen desire to serve the public and make life better for people out in the community.
Whatever they are, Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis write in their book You Coach You, that understanding the exact reason or reasons you want to progress your career is essential. It ensures your progression pathway is personalised to you (what you’re ready for, what you’re really interested in), rather than simply cutting and pasting what others have done. It can help you progress at your own (faster, or slower) pace, rather than having progression come on the organisation’s timetable. And when we progress in a way or in a direction that matches our motivations, we can get even more energy and enjoyment from it.
How to develop your career without moving up
There are lots of options for developing your career without promotion being one of them. Let’s look at just three of them in this post.
I talked in my job satisfaction post earlier this year about ‘job crafting’, and that’s a key way to develop your public sector career without moving up. Secondment or creating a special project bolted on to your current role is another. And, lastly, taking charge of your learning or designing your own L&D programme to enable you to become an authority on your subject or enable a future move is another one.
Keep in mind, as you read, that if making an impact is a driver of career progression for you, it’s something you can do within your own team, business group and organisation too. How could you develop your career in such a way that you make an impact as you go?
Job crafting
Job crafting is a term that was developed by American researchers Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, and means adjusting the design of your job so you are more engaged, feel more of a sense of thriving at work, and have better job satisfaction overall. They found that you can customise your job to better suit your strengths, interests, and motivations in three ways:
By changing the number and/or nature of tasks you do as part of your job, how you do them, and their scope
By altering the relationships and interactions you establish and maintain as part of your job
By thinking about your job and its component parts differently, for example, by re-interpreting the purpose, outcomes and potential impacts it has.
An example from my own years as a policy analyst was when I became a ‘go-to person’ for help on information-gathering in the front half of the policy development process. I loved research, and doing less options analysis and Ministerial or Cabinet paper drafting suited me just fine.
But job-crafting can mean even incredibly simple changes, like changing how you do a task. Such as deliberately organising to work alongside colleague on a task that bores you to tears, so you can chat as you go, or to take your task to the café downstairs and smash it out over a coffee. The possibilities are endless.
Secondments and side projects
Taking an advertised secondment, or engineering one for yourself through networking, is another excellent way to develop your career when moving up’s not currently on the cards. Secondments enable you to change up your day-to-day tasks, learn a new subject area or professional discipline, and meet a new group of colleagues.
Secondments can be internal or external, part-time (where you split your time between your home and secondment roles) or full-time, for just a few months or a year or more.
A high-value secondment I did a few years ago was to work on a 0.5 FTE basis on a three-month special project in a different team and business group, in a completely different building. I had the opportunity to see another team and senior leader at work, got to lead a Ministerially-commissioned piece of work, and to coach a graduate analyst assigned to the team. Lots of growth in a short time!
But a side project is also a great way to add more purpose and meaning to your role – like a side hustle, except inside your main hustle. It could be a small assignment that will inform an upcoming project in your team, like a feasibility piece or a literature review. Or, it could be volunteering to be your business group or division’s key contact for an organisation-wide piece of work, like the annual report or website re-design.
Designing your own L&D programme
Learning and development isn’t a topic your manager will necessarily talk to you about these days, so you may need to take the lead. We know from the 2025 Public Service Census, that insufficient learning and professional development is the fifth strongest reason for public servants wanting to leave their job.
Many people think that professional development equals training courses. And while external training or study towards a qualification is certainly one route to growing your knowledge and progressing your career, it's far from the only one.
I worked in an organisation for several years where policy analysts were encouraged to keep up-to-date with the literature in their particular specialisation, so reading industry magazines, research articles, or relevant books was something I did for a couple of hours most Fridays.
Attending conferences in your field is also a great way to learn the lay of the land in your subject area or professional discipline – what’s topical, the emerging issues, new opportunities. But it’s expensive to attend a whole conference, particularly overseas. Luckily these days, it’s often possible to pay for a half-day ticket, or for just the sessions which are streamed.
You can also create yourself a course in the professional discipline in which you’d like to progress, by getting hold of the textbooks used by university classes in that discipline. University library websites will often share the official reading lists for different classes.
What part of your subject area or professional discipline would you like to know more about? Follow the spark.
Make your professional development visible
One of the reasons most people like moving up a level in the public sector hierarchy, is because it gets them a new title that shows outwardly that they’ve advanced their capability and capacity for responsibility.
So when you develop your career without moving up a role, you need to find other ways to show that our skills and knowledge have changed and we're on an upward trajectory. If you don't, you won’t fully leverage your learning and development in going after your career progression goals.
Tara Mohr, in her book Playing Big, talks about making your work visible as being the key difference between what we were taught was necessary at university and what’s necessary to ‘play big’ and make things happen at work.
It’s not always comfortable to talk about our professional efforts – especially if we think of it as self-promotion – but there are ways to reframe it and share our efforts without too much discomfort.
Tara suggests thinking about sharing your work with others as an act of service, as the information you share may help someone else. Or alternatively, think of it as a report-back like you’d do for anything other project, to show how you’ve been using your time.
Sharing your learning and development activity could be as simple as talking for 1-2 minutes at a team or business group meeting about what you’ve been learning. You could post on LinkedIn about it, or if you’re braver, write a piece about it for your organisation intranet, if it could help others more broadly.
With all of the organisational change in the public sector, cuts to the number of roles and promotion rounds being delayed or put on the back burner, women in the public sector are wondering how they can move up and progress their careers.
Things have changed in the last few years: climbing the career ladder isn’t as simple as it used to be, and managers don’t always have the bandwidth to engage their team members in career progression conversations.
So, it’s often now up to us to take charge of and enable our own career progression and development. And if we do, and we make the professional development efforts known and visible to others, we can pave the way for all sorts of progression opportunities.
If you’re still wondering how to progress your career even when moving up’s not currently an option, let me know. Coaching is a good way to bounce around ideas, and get you the clarity, knowledge and direction to lead your own development.
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Hi, I'm Marie-Louise. I help women in the public sector make more progress in their work, with less stress and burnout, so that they can feel more satisfied and positive at the end of the day.
I write this weekly-ish blog, to share the helpful action-oriented gems from the research evidence I find in my reading. I recently launched a new 1:1 online coaching session focusing on tackling your work overwhelm, and offer personalised coaching too. Get in touch, I’d love to hear from you. I'm at marie-louise@fireflycoaching.nz or www.linkedin.com/in/marie-louise-siddle on LinkedIn.