You’re not imagining it. It really is harder to move up and progress your career in the New Zealand public sector these days.
The quantitative data from the 2025 Public Service Census shows that of the 46% of people who were thinking of leaving their jobs in the following 12 months, 42% said it was because of a lack of career progression in their current jobs. And in the open-ended comments, people shared that they didn’t think their organisations were doing enough to develop and retain their talent. For example, one person said,
“I don't believe the HR structures are effective in promoting people that are working above and beyond their positions, or in incentivising great people to stay.”
As these data suggest, the ‘promotion round’ is no longer the dependable mechanism it once was to develop professionally. The tricky thing is, since the Public Service Census took place at the start of last year, it has also become increasingly hard to change organisations when you want to progress.
This post picks up the topic of my blog post of a few weeks ago, Can't move up? How to progress your career anyway, but builds in more information on the evidence-based process of job crafting as one of the best solutions.
Why the traditional path to public sector career progression has stalled
There doesn’t seem to be any data on the extent to which internal promotion through a ‘promotion round’ is happening within public service and wider public sector organisations. Women I’ve talked to this year about career progression have talked about how there is uncertainty about when or even if they could move up using that route, or have not mentioned promotion rounds as a career progression strategy at all.
My sense is that the high degree of organisational restructuring happening over the past three years, and Government calls for public sector cost savings, means that organisations won’t have been in a position to offer internal promotions. To be fair, it would be difficult to offer the possibility of a significantly higher salary to an employee, when an organisation doesn’t know for sure if measures like restructuring and voluntary redundancy programmes are going to net the cost savings they need to deliver.
To achieve significant change in the seniority of and remuneration for their work then, people have understandably been looking to change organisations. But, for the same reasons as above, organisations often aren’t able to hire externally for vacant or new roles.
Which all leaves women in their 30s and 40s, who want to progress their career, between a rock and a hard place.
But career progression still matters
So, finding other ways to progress your career and keep your work ‘fresh’ is really important.
Staying still in your job, when you hunger to do more, be more or give more, leads to job dissatisfaction and disinvesting in it emotionally. Conversely, changing up different components of your job to grow in your capability at work keeps you feeling energised, excited and engaged, and makes job satisfaction and a feeling of flourishing in your career more likely.
So, when it’s hard to get promoted, the job market is no help, but you still want more challenge in your role, job crafting is one of the best tools in the toolbox.
What is job crafting and how does it work?
Jane E. Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski (from the University of Michigan and New York University respectively) first started using the term job crafting in their 2001 research paper. It caught on and has since been carried forward by other researchers like Maria Tims, Arnold Bakker and others around the world.
Job crafting is when an individual redesigns their job in one or more different ways to make it more interesting, more aligned to their skillset, personality, or professional identity, more challenging, or less stressful. Tims and Bakker (2010) described three different ways in which you can craft your job: by increasing the resources that come with your job (split into structural and social resources), increasing the challenge inherent in the demands of your job, and decreasing the aspects of your job that are a hindrance.
Structural job resources are the variety of tasks you do, the autonomy, performance feedback, professional learning opportunities you're given, and practical details like your work hours and location. Social job resources are the support you get from your colleagues and manager, social interactions at work, and coaching and mentoring.
Job demands are the physical, mental or emotional efforts your job requires, which can be good and challenging, like when you’re working on a new project that lifts your capability or brings work accomplishments. But job demands can also be hindering, like outdated bureaucratic processes, organisational politics, stress-triggering colleagues, or moral injury.
The problem that precedes job crafting, and that job crafting works to fix, is a poor person-job fit. When you and your job don’t have good overlap, it can show up in a number of ways: feeling unmotivated or bored, chronically stressed, overloaded or overwhelmed, different from the rest of your team, or just generally disengaged.
Fortunately, research shows that job crafting leads to a better person-job fit, enhanced meaning, and feeling more engaged and satisfied at work. For example, in a recent study I read about, by Nissinen et al. (2022) in the Finnish public sector, found that employees who used job crafting to increase the structural and social resources available to them and increase the challenge level of their roles, also increased in their work engagement.
Want to dive in? How to get started with job crafting
To progress your career by trying out some job crafting, first, spend a few moments getting clear on how you feel about your job in really specific terms, and where those feelings come from. For example, you may feel a sense of strain in your job, what does that relate to?
Are you required to do a range of tasks which don’t enable you to use what you’re good at every day?
Do you find it taxing interacting with your team and wider business group members, because you’ve realised they’re not really your ‘tribe’?
Or, maybe you’re not clear what the significance of your work is and who it matters to, and that is niggling away at you?
Going through this self-examination process will give you a better sense of where in your work you might best go hunting for job crafting opportunities. You don’t want to invest effort in engineering an adjusted range of work tasks, when the real reason you’re not getting what you need out of work is because you don’t get good performance feedback from your manager or colleagues (and maybe getting that would get you back on track in your job).
It’s worth noting here that research shows that ‘expansive’ job crafting, which seeks to increase the structural and social resources you can draw on for your work, and the level of challenge demands in your job, is best for improving how engaged you feel at work and the level of meaning you can find in your work.
Research studies have found that seeking to reduce or eliminate hindering job demands can actually lead to less of a feeling of engagement with your work, because you can inadvertently reduce the scope of your job and limit learning opportunities, although you’ll feel work is easier and less stressful.
In fact, that finding holds a kind of shortcut (if you’d like one) to improving your job through job crafting. Earlier research found that injecting more learning opportunities into your work was the strongest predictor of increased engagement (Sarti, 2014).
So, after clarifying where the issue lies, your second step to getting the reshaping of your job underway is to brainstorm opportunities for increasing the structural and social resources available to you in your job (including learning opportunities) and the opportunities for bringing in tasks and projects that offer you beneficial and rewarding challenge.
Here, it can be really useful to share what you’re thinking about and that you’re trying job crafting with some trusted colleagues, and maybe even your team leader or manager. Jess Annison, in her book Smart Careers, calls it gathering your career crafting crew. They can help you with ideas for different or additional tasks you could take on, ways to learn professionally that have worked for them, or upcoming projects that could add good challenge to your role.
All the academic research on job crafting I’ve reviewed, what I know from my own career in the public sector and those of women I know, suggest that job crafting works really positively in most job situations.
There are exceptions though. For example, when your business group or organisation is toxic, or when you have suffered bullying, it may be that changing business groups or even organisation is the very best thing you could do, not just for your career progression, but for your mental health.
There are also some ins and outs to the job crafting process that I haven’t included here, such the personal characteristics and work characteristics that can facilitate, or even super-charge job crafting. So, I promise to share those soon in upcoming posts. But until then, happy thinking and happy crafting!
_________________
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 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.