Your country needs you

Why you should join the Mid-Career Fast Stream

It’s an exciting time to work in government, and not just for the Ministers who got new jobs on Monday!

The challenges facing the public sector are daunting, but for many of us that’s why we want to work in government – civil service jobs come with the chance to make a real difference to people’s lives. Yes, lots has been written about the problems the civil service has – indeed, we at Re:State have a research programme focused on ways it could be better. But these are still fantastic jobs that so many people flock to because all the fundamentals for a fulfilling career are there.

But for a country whose leaders so often say that they want “the best and the brightest” to come and work in the government, we sure don’t make it easy for them to do so. For many people the civil service still feels like a ‘closed shop’ which promotes its own, and despite years of attempts to open it up to people from the outside the profession has struggled to shake this image and the reality that underpins it. Last week the Cabinet Secretary announced that she would scrap civil service “behaviours”, the hiring tool which is the most famous example of this insider model – a welcome move that we called for in our paper Making the grade.

If the Government really wants to open up Whitehall to outsiders, then it needs to go further than levelling the playing field for applicants – it needs to also find ways to reduce the friction stopping the most talented people outside of government finding their way into the civil service.

In Making the grade we identified a “missing middle” in the Government’s recruitment approach which created lots of this friction. For early-career applicants there are lots of obvious ‘front doors’ into Whitehall, like the Civil Service Fast Stream or the graduate schemes some departments run separately. These have good brand recognition, are highly competitive, and attract thousands of applicants every year. And while there is no equivalent front door for very senior people to join the civil service, in practice many top roles are filled using professional headhunters or networks which reduces the friction for talented, deeply experienced people looking to share their experience with the public sector.

The problem is that there’s no front door for people in between these two career stages, the ones who we would call ‘mid-career’ candidates – people who’ve had enough time in the workforce to have demonstrated exceptional talent, but not enough that they could move across into a top job in Whitehall. For them, the only option is navigating the Wild West of the Civil Service Jobs website – which this week has over 250 roles advertised on any one day, often with confusing descriptions which don’t help external candidates work out where they would be the best fit. For a consultant ten years into their career, the founder who has sold a business, the military officer leaving as a Major, or the entrepreneurial charity director, there is no route specifically designed to attract them to bring their talents into the civil service.

Two years ago we recommended the Cabinet Office set up a Mid-Career Fast Stream to attract these people and provide that single front door into government for high-potential people looking to make a change from what they’re currently doing. There are encouraging signs that the civil service are taking this seriously – Antonia Romeo mentioned a route in for mid-career joiners in her first hearing with parliamentarians as Cabinet Secretary, and the Future Civil Service programme has announced it is looking at a “new entry point for talent into the Civil Service for those joining mid-way through their careers”.

So today we’ve published an outline of how they can put our Mid-Career Fast Stream into practice. A small cohort of 50 external hires, on a two-year programme to train them up to become Deputy Directors in the civil service when they graduate from it, with high standards for entry and for passing. Based around an apprenticeship model with candidates each being mentored by some of the most senior civil servants, and supported by a curriculum of genuine induction and professional development of the kind which is so rare in Whitehall.

The Civil Service should see this as an opportunity to bring in some of the best talent from outside government to be the leaders of the future. But it is also an opportunity for Whitehall to hit the ‘restart’ button on some of its basic ways of working, and to building the future of what its workforce model should be outside of the mainstream civil service approach. For example, by default the scheme would bring new participants in with higher starting salaries than they would get in comparable internal roles, but in exchange receiving only a more industry-standard ‘defined contribution’ pension rather than the expensive ‘defined benefit’ pensions which are still standard in the civil service (and continue to store up big fiscal costs for future governments). And for applicants, this would be the biggest change to the way the civil service recruits since the establishment of equivalents to the modern fast stream routes in the late 1980s.

So if you’re reading this and thinking about making a big career change to join the civil service in the middle of your career, then keep your eye out for more news from the Government on the Cabinet Secretary’s plans for a mid-career route into Whitehall – because this just might be the job for you.

Your country needs you!

Plan for Government: a Mid-Career Fast Stream is available now.