Public sector workers can hack it in private sector

By : Ruth Spellman

A recent survey suggested that public sector staff looking for new roles will be shunned by private sector companies because they lack a “cut and thrust” attitude. I wholeheartedly disagree.

It doesn’t help, of course, that myths about the public sector won’t go away. Workers from the sector are said to “have it easy” and thrive on a “culture of blame and buck-passing”. These untruths are creating a stigma that could harm people’s future job prospects, and encourage private sector employers to avoid hiring public sector staff.

Employees who have only ever worked in the private sector believe that it’s about time the public sector fell from grace and suffered like every other part of the economy has since the downturn began. It’s a vindictive attitude perpetuated by the assertion that the sector has enjoyed a recent boom, while its private sector counterparts have experienced unimaginable suffering during the downturn.

The survey by recruitment firm Ambition has helped to give the impression that the public sector is not up-to-scratch when it comes to handling business. But I think the reverse is true. Those private sector employers who fail to recruit the most talented employees, and prejudice themselves against people with different career backgrounds are inadvertently exposing their own management weaknesses.

Their inability to see the value of recruiting from a diverse background and their failure to recognise that public sector workers have an enormous amount to offer suggests a lack of foresight on their part and marks them out as narrow minded. All this at a time when we need our managers to be thinking innovatively and creatively to tackle the challenges that the post-recession climate puts forth.

A good example of someone who moved from the public into the private sector, and did so very successfully, is Anji Hunter. Former director of government relations under Tony Blair, Hunter moved to BP as director of communications and 18 months later, moved again to Anglo American. She is tremendously successful and absolutely disproves the theory that the two sectors are somehow, mutually exclusive.

So what can public sector employees do to increase their chances when job-seeking? First and foremost, ex-public sector workers should be readily able to give examples of how their core skills are easily transferrable. After all, the public and private sectors share many similarities. How someone manages resources or motivates their team, for example, is not sector-specific. If you can do it in one area, you should be able to in another.

Allowing people to move more easily between sectors and have their transferrable skills appreciated by both will be of enormous benefit to UK plc as a whole. There should be a real emphasis now, across both sectors, on the value of transferrable skills and the notion that people can, and do, move from sector to sector throughout the careers, should be reinforced.

There is no escaping the fact that the public sector has been dogged by examples of poor management of late; who can forget Mid Stafford NHS trust, where up to 1,200 patients may have died needlessly because of appalling care and conditions? But, there are enough column inches dedicated to the errors of judgement in the private sector, too. Against this backdrop it would be unreasonable for the private sector to close the door on talented workers and deny private businesses the best men and women available.

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