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06/30/2006
The Job-Hunting Circus: Part 3
As a sequel to Part 1 and Part 2 of the Job-Hunting Circus rants, here we are for Part 3 - Job-hunting Government-style!
On Monday, June 26, the major headline on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen was "PS [Public Service] faces critical loss of workers". The subtitle below it was "As boomers leave, young people don't want their jobs, new survey suggests". (The rest of the article can be read here.) The premise seems reasonable - after all, everyone knows about the boomers who are starting to approach retirement age. The subtitle makes sense at first glance too, from what I know of my friends' government jobs, namely, that none of them liked their jobs.
However, the article is a bit confusing, both literally and figuratively. Check out this quote in the last paragraph:
"They have to recognize that the market is so different now and will be for a long time to come, and the problem is that public servants are an attractive source of labour especially the older workers and Gen Xers so they will get nabbed and the young ones may go for a year or two to get it on their resume," she said.
*boggle* What exactly did she say? "They" are the Gen Xers from what I gathered from the previous paragraph, but then everything stops making sense about halfway through the quote and goes downhill from there. Anyway, I think what's going on is that they're concluding that the Boomers will retire, the Gen Xers will leave the gov't to make loads of cash in the private sector, and the Gen Y (28 and under) will dabble in gov't jobs for a year or two to get it on their resume, then follow the Gen Xers to the private sector to make loads of cash. Gen Y is the key to solving the long-term problem, but we're barely mentioned in the article.
There were a couple more problems with the article that were more than just the necessity of heavy-duty grammatical parsing. First of all, the subtitle said that young people don't want the gov't jobs, but concluded that young people would get gov't jobs to spruce up their resumes. So in a way, they do want gov't jobs. They just don't want to keep the gov't jobs. Really, then, the problem is not that no young people want to work for the government, but that in general, the job quality isn't very good (which was quite nicely described in the article) and that translates to a retention problem.
The second problem is that, well, it's news to me that they're looking for young people to replace the loss of Boomers. I think they must mean young people = Gen Xers (baby bust), not young people = Gen Y, who are in their 20s. I've given up on applying for government jobs, because as far as I can tell, the resumes and applications go into a black hole. If they are really that desperate for people, they have an odd way of showing it!
In any case, I'm not losing sleep over it. When it takes 8 months to go through a job selection process, and even the chances of them reading the application are about as remote as Harper actually having a plan to replace the EnerGuide and One-Tonne Challenge programs, who would want to apply for a government job? And then, for those who miraculously do get hired, and then usually end up hating their job, while getting raises/promotions only if they threaten to quit, who would want a government job anyway?
I think that's about it for now on the government topic. They have issues, and finally an article has outlined the problem, as long as you can follow the roundabout logic!
I'll conclude with this cute little gem I found in a (non-government) job description recently:
You will be analytically inclined and able to meet aggressive timelines in a multi-disciplinary environment focused on teamwork. You will also have demonstrated an ability to work independently with a great attention to detail while maintaining a high level of initiative.
In other words: we set an impossible deadline. Then you and your team members must have the initiative to figure out how to make us as much money as possible and then have the determination (or stupidity) to work 24/7 to make it happen. (and what’s up with “focused on teamwork” and then “work independently”?) No wonder Dilbert comics are so popular these days...
14:26 Posted in Job Hunting | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this