I’ve been doing some reflection recently on work and career progression in the public sector.
When I first looked at the Public Service Census data last year, I was captured by the statistic that 44% of respondents said they were often or always stressed at work in the public service in the 12 months prior. I consider it quite an indictment on how work in the public sector is designed – even though I remain a loyal public sector supporter.
But when I think through my conversations with women I know working in the public sector, while they are stressed, this isn’t the thing they tend to bring up as a situation they wish was different.
Instead, they talk about how they’d like to move up, from analyst to senior, or from senior to principal, for example, but that the options for career progression feel very limited at the moment or even non-existent. So they feel stuck (understandably). This perceived (real?) lack of career progression opportunities shows up in the Public Service Census data too, with 42% of those who said they wanted to leave their jobs saying it was because they couldn’t progress.
It got me to thinking – what are the other themes from what I observed myself working in the public sector for 20 years, alongside other women, and from what I heard from them then and are hearing from them now?
So, following on from my reflection, here are what I think are the three themes that crop up (or have cropped up) the most. See if you can pick what they have in common.
Most public sector women know where they want their career to go and hold themselves accountable for not being there yet
I first started noticing this theme when I was working in a large government department early on in my public sector career. I mentored more than one female colleague who wanted to move out of their current role to one more senior, or in a different professional discipline, or in a different organisation. None of them were sure of the way forward.
What all of them said though was, What do I need to do? Should I do extra study? How can I get extra experience to increase my chances? And so on. That is, they seemed to assume they lacked knowledge, skills, experience and credentials that had value, and that there was some gap that first had to be bridged before career progression was possible. Their many strengths were being passed over and left out of the picture.
It reminds me of something coach Tara Mohr writes about in her book Playing Big, that many women carry an internal voice, quick to ask whether they're really ready or qualified enough, long before anyone external ever raises the question. Mohr calls it the 'inner critic'. Psychologist Ethan Kross calls it ‘chatter’: when the inner voice in our head runs amok.
It would take longer than this blog post to unpack why the inner critic, or chatter, appears for women in relation to work and progressing our careers, but if you hear your inner critic saying ‘Who are you to think you can move up to Principal Advisor?’, and you don’t catch it, it makes logical sense that you’d look for ways you can enhance your CV.
The public sector support gap nobody’s talking about
I was fortunate to work for several very good managers in the public sector, who believed that growing their staff was very much part of their job, not only to help the organisation do its work better, but for their employees’ own careers.
There was the one who was overt about giving me work that would help me move up to senior analyst. The one who asked me, almost from Day One, to consider what training courses I would find interesting and helpful in my work. And the one that said they believed that their staff were almost like wagons on a train, to have learning and new experiences loaded onto them before they continued on their way.
Unfortunately, my impression is that, particularly from the height of the COVID pandemic onward, employees’ career development as part of a manager’s role has gradually fallen by the wayside. I hope that I’m wrong, but my sense is that employees in the public sector are needing to offer themselves that leadership around career progression these days. There’s so much work on, managers themselves are feeling the same overwhelm at work as their teams, and organisational restructuring processes make work life so chaotic and uncertain that professional development gets demoted behind just surviving and getting the work done week-to-week.
The trouble for workers is that, as Helen Tupper and Sarah Ellis say in their book Learn like a lobster, if you wait for your manager or HR to approach you about your development (or the perfect job to appear on the Seek horizon), you could end up stuck.
Women are highly employable, but the public sector progression game has changed
Which brings me to the last of three themes I want to share.
My observation is that women working in the public sector are feeling that career progression options are limited because they really are! At least in comparison with when I was first in the public sector prior to 2008.
The traditional ways to move up the ladder for more role responsibility or more salary have, since the GFC and then COVID, become less reliable. The cuts and restructuring in the last three years have made both internal promotion, and changing organisations harder. And with future large-scale job cuts planned, the game may change even more.
But what's clear to me, is that it’s definitely not through lack of determination, or growth mindset, or education that women are finding it harder to progress. In fact, most women in the public sector I’ve worked with have been driven seekers of learning and highly qualified educationally. If you take my last four managers in the public sector as an example, all were women who had, respectively, a PhD, an MBA, a Masters in Public Policy, and a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies. And among my female friends in the sector at the moment, it’s the same.
It all comes back to career progression
Now that I've laid out each of the three themes, how do they sit with you? Do they marry with your own experience, observations, conversations?
And did you pick what all three themes have in common?
Yip, all three themes lead us back to the issue of career progression. The women I’ve worked with in the public sector, and those I have conversations with these days, all:
Have a drive to do their best work
Want to be able to contribute their skills, knowledge and experience to work that has meaning and that matters
Hanker after a role that is mentally stimulating and that gives them responsibility, opportunities for learning, and a chance to test and grow their capability.
But the sense of being stymied in their career progression efforts comes because it really is harder these days, at least to progress in the ways we always used to.
Re-looking at the Public Service Census data and finding the statistic that it’s a lack of career progression that is the main reason for wanting to leave, and realising that that echoes what I’ve seen and heard myself, has actually made me rejig the focus of my coaching. It’s not that stress isn’t real for women in the public sector, it definitely is. But when I think about what they actually raise themselves as an issue they want to solve, it’s progression, not stress, that keeps coming up.
If any of this sounds familiar — if you recognise yourself in one of these three themes, or all of them — I want you to know: the stuck feeling is not a verdict on your capability. It's a mismatch between where you want to go and the traditional routes for getting there no longer being guaranteed to work.
Helping you find a different route to the impact-making, responsibility and challenge you’re after, is what I work on with clients, even when ‘up’ isn’t currently an option. Let me know if you need help.
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Hi, I'm Marie-Louise. I help women in their 30s and 40s in the public sector progress their career without changing their job — starting with getting on top of the day-to-day overwhelm that gets in the way.
I write this weekly-ish blog to share helpful, action-oriented ideas from the research I read, applied to public sector work. I've recently launched a 1:1 online coaching offering focused on tackling work overwhelm, and I'm developing a session to help women diagnose whether there's scope to reshape their current role for real career growth. Personalised coaching is available 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.