New job

After twenty years with Depart­ment of Con­sumer and Employ­ment Pro­tec­tion and its pre­de­cessors the Min­istry of Fair Trad­ing, I star­ted a new job last week, a second­ment to the State Lib­rary of West­ern Australia.

To those of you not famil­iar with the mys­tical inner work­ings of the West­ern Aus­tralian pub­lic sec­tor, a second­ment is a tem­por­ary loan of an employee from one Gov­ern­ment Depart­ment to another. The pro­cess is com­pet­it­ive is most cases, the job vacancy is advert­ised (www.jobs.wa.gov.au), writ­ten applic­a­tions required and most applic­a­tion are far more than a CV, you need to address the selec­tion cri­teria and then is most cases an interview.

The advant­age for the new agency is they get a far big­ger and bet­ter pool of applic­ants to select from. The advant­age for the employee is they gain to exper­i­ence and new skills, without risk­ing their old job, bene­fits or their golden hand­cuff (super­an­nu­ation). The advant­age to the old agency is that if the employee returns, they do so with new skills, exper­i­ence and ideas.

If an employee returns, second­ment is often seen as a try before you buy for the new agency and employee. Though it just the nature of the beast. In the­ory a second­ment is only avail­able for spe­cial pro­ject work or when (in pub­lic ser­vice speak) the sub­stant­ive occu­pant is not occupy­ing their pos­i­tion, i.e. they are on second­ment, act­ing (the term used for intra-agency second­ment) or on leave (I will not try to explain to our Amer­ican friends long ser­vice leave, but lets say leave peri­ods of 3 or 6 months are not uncommon).

For example, the Man­ager of the Inter­net and Online Ser­vices of the State Lib­rary of West­ern Aus­tralia was seconded to do a spe­cial pro­ject with the Shared Ser­vices Centre. (the WA pub­lic sec­tor is under­go­ing a major restruc­ture with some ser­vices, prin­cip­ally human resources and fin­ances being taken out of the depart­ments and cent­ral­ised). The Con­sult­ant Web Ser­vices was appoin­ted to act in the pos­i­tion of Man­ager of the Inter­net and Online Ser­vices and the pos­i­tion of Con­sult­ant Web Ser­vices became tem­por­ar­ily vacant, was advert­ised, I applied and was successful.

If the Man­ager did a good job at Shared Ser­vices, then they would have a good chance of get­ting a per­meant job there. The pos­i­tion of Man­ager would become vacant and the Con­sult­ant Web Ser­vices would have a good chance of get­ting that pos­i­tion. Leav­ing the Con­sult­ants pos­i­tion open, and if I did a decent job between now and then, I would have a good chance of get­ting that pos­i­tion. How­ever, there is a big if, the State Lib­rary of West­ern Aus­tralia is also under­go­ing a major restruc­ture, and depend­ing on the new struc­ture, there may be no pos­i­tion for me on the July 1 when the new struc­ture takes effect and as my second­ment cur­rently ends on 30 June, I may be back at DOCEP with some new skills and exper­i­ence, in the new fin­an­cial year.

Mean­while, I need to take advant­age of the perks of the new jobs, being loc­ated at the Cul­tural Centre in Perth, the Art Gal­lery and the Museum are just out­side the front door, and a huge choice of res­taur­ants are within a couple of blocks, not to men­tion the books.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Personal . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.