I am so glad I made the decision to return to private enterprise, I feel my time in the public sector wasn’t a total washout as I made some reasonable career decisions.
I used this time to engage in tertiary education, I began at diploma level, that earned me first year advanced standing allowing me to begin in second year university saving myself a third of tuition fees. The training and development degree didn’t pay off in the government; that’s for sure but I was able to leverage that knowledge in the private sector and continue to do so. However, with my return to the private sector paid immediate dividends.
Actually, the knowledge gained helped land me to not only land the job but to excel in the role. I also undertook every possible opportunity and role in my former job to learn the job ground up from multiple perspectives. I am a firm believer in informal learning, throughout my part-time study I used actual work experiences to develop assignments and case studies. This on-the-job knowledge learnt through practical application is deeply embedded and easily recalled in pressure situations such as a panel interview.
Moving onto a business degree was a fantastic personal learning experience, once again totally worthless in the public sector as they don’t utilise contemporary leadership and management practices. My move back to the private sector saw immediate application of leadership, project management, organisational behaviour, operations and general management learning. It was exactly as I had been trained, these were required skills.
I can say I only ever used organisational behaviour principles in the state government sector, this included the principles of negotiation. However, as in any government institution the first answer is NO followed closely by denial until the physical evidence is so overwhelming and cannot be denied any further.
Then, and only then may they admit they may have inadvertently and accidentally made a regrettable mistake. Naturally, the emphasis is on the term may and even then I am not really considered credible. Yet, somehow I seem to be able to pull these stunning meeting bombshells on a regular basis – funny that. When you are better prepared, employ an overarching strategy, possess superior tactics and negotiation skills – you have a personal confidence.
How I present this information is using department policy and procedures that has been highlighted in the critical sections and bookmarked. Firstly they try to deny and state that I am incorrect so I open my file and pass the relevant documents around to stunned silence before a stuttering and gagged excuse.
These are actually the moments I am going to miss in the private sector, the stunned looks on their faces are hilarious. You step into a meeting and their first action is to ridicule you, they openly mock me and just laugh straight at my claims. I wait, I bait and I play along until I present the critical information and countdown until the carnage begins. From these meetings I have actually changed policy, at the very least I have reinforced actual application of policy and procedures – that I will miss for sure.
Observations in an undemocratic world 