Not great if you already have a career
Pros
Mind blowing pension contributions by employer. Biggest training budget I’ve ever encountered - fancy a masters? Why not have two? You get to swan about in Whitehall feeling like you’re on the set of a film.
Cons
It’s an organisation of 35k staff and another 20K contract staff, so I can’t comment on the entirety of the organisation, however I worked in several roles in corporate services and found it very unsatisfying. I came in at middle management with a pre-existing well honed skillset but found that this counted for very little, HO (as it’s called by those who work there) exists to essentially pollinate itself and likes to recruit people when they’re young and then keep them in the fold as ‘civil servants’ moving them about and training them to think and act in a way peculiar to HO. If (like me) you come in with skills, capabilities and experience from elsewhere you will find this counts for very little as HO likes to do things very much its own way. I found my specialist professional knowledge and experience routinely ignored in favour of the thoughts and experiences of long term civil servants who had no knowledge, training, or experience in my profession (project, programme, and change management), by the end of three years there I was minuting meetings, making slides, and basically doing admin akin to when I’d been an office temp twenty years earlier. I was constantly told about the HO way to do things and eventually I gave up and left as I’d come there to bring my skillset to them, not have it ignored and overwritten so I couldn’t work anywhere else. I came to be a PM at the Home Office, I wasn’t prepared for the fact that being a Civil Servant is a profession in itself and one that is supposed to override any profession or specialism you may also happen to have. Internal progression is totally structureless and random - I only got different jobs by networking with people, I put in over fifty internal formal applications and never passed the papersift despite getting top marks for my application and interview for my initial job. Pay grade and responsibility have no baring on each other- a £30K team leader can have ten staff and decision making responsibilities and a £55K middle manager can be minuting meetings and fetching tea.
