If you’re a woman in her 30s or 40s, navigating on a daily basis the turbulence in the New Zealand public sector, but also wanting to keep her career moving and developing, it may not feel like the best of times work-wise.
The usual ways to progress your public sector career have become less dependable. Promotion rounds don’t seem to be happening with the frequency they used to, if at all, more people are holding onto their roles for longer, and restructures are resulting in job cuts – and more may still go. Jobs are still being advertised, but my goodness, with so many people applying for each role, job hunting is a truly daunting prospect.
Women working in the public sector still want career development, though
But… From the women I’ve been talking to throughout this year and before, I’ve heard that meaningful work is still a priority for them, they still want their work to be fulfilling, they want to contribute what they know and can do, to have an impact and help others.
I’ve also heard a lot about women feeling at work that they’re pulled in multiple directions at once, having a sheer volume of work that is untenable, the extra pressure that comes when good people are lost as a result of restructures, and work encroaching on personal lives. Quite understandably, women want to figure out how to get away from all that.
So, what do you do with that desire for fulfilment and career progression, and an understandable desire to have a less stressful work life, when the usual routes to a better situation have clogged up or been blocked?
Coaching is an option, but there's a 'but'
While I am a big believer in the value of coaching, and the value that coaching conversations can bring coaching clients in terms of clarity, confidence, and career progression, open-ended coaching mightn’t be the best tool to help women over this career hurdle.
Fully personalised coaching can take a couple of sessions, or even more, to reach the point where possible actions have been brainstormed and defined for the person being coached to go away and experiment with. In the context of busy women in the public sector, especially if they work part-time, juggling work against caring responsibilities, fully personalised coaching may be too time-consuming.
And, because fully personalised coaching is open-ended, the outcome for the person being coached isn’t clear at the outset, and when the price tag per coaching hour is not insignificant but the results aren’t obvious, a several-session coaching programme would be too expensive.
Besides, a coaching session that is explicitly focused on this one issue — how you can find more job satisfaction and career progression in spite of the current roadblocks — and that can be effective in a very short space of time, needs a different kind of mechanism. I think the mechanism that's called for is job crafting. It's an evidence-based approach, based on the idea that most roles have more flex in them than we think, and that once you know the right direction to go in, you can reshape what you do day-to-day. More of what energises you, less of what drains you, without needing a new job title to do it.
Job crafting isn’t a concept most people have come across, though, and even if they had, they wouldn't necessarily know how to apply it to their own role without a wee bit of guidance.
That’s why I built my new Job Audit session
To address these issues of ‘time’s short, and money is too’, but still provide a coaching solution to the issue of finding yourself as a woman working in the public sector stuck in a job that’s no longer right but without other good options available, I created my Can we craft it? Job Audit session.
In one 60-minute session, you get:
Clarity on what's actually driving your dissatisfaction with your job: the demands of the role? a lack of resources and support? or a mismatch between what you do and what matters to you?
An honest steer on whether your current role has genuine room to be reshaped (and if it doesn't, you'll know that too, rather than spending months finding out the hard way)
A concrete starting point for turning your job into the job you want: specific, realistic changes to experiment with in your own role
A plan you can implement straightaway, without committing to an ongoing coaching relationship you don't have the time or budget for right now (unless you’d like that kind of ongoing support).
Ongoing, open-ended coaching is powerful, but it asks you to commit more time and money before you know what you're working towards, and for many of the women I talk to, that's simply not realistic at the moment. The Job Audit gives you a solid result to act on, within one session. If it turns out there's more you want to explore together after that, personalised coaching is there.
And the need behind this isn't me jumping to a conclusion on the basis of the conversations I’m having. In the 2025 Public Service Census, lack of career progression opportunities was cited by roughly half of public servants as the number one reason they wanted to leave their job, even ahead of workload and stress. People aren't losing the will to grow. It’s just that the conventional ways to achieve it have become materially harder.
The Job Audit session is my answer to that gap: a way to inject new learning and professional growth, and find forward momentum in your public sector career, in spite of the roadblocks in your way.