Pros
- Excellent flexible working policy at the time of working. Very good life/work balance (unless you choose to work more if interested by your work) - Not paid for extra hours but could get them back as A/L - Excellent pension scheme - Excellent access to very valuable linked data assets, very interesting research and learning opportunities once/if you work to find them, some very talented, driven, smart and inspiring co-workers
Cons
Civil Service bureaucracy, outdated systems that are a pain to work with and undermine the quality and accuracy of research (DAP), delays with automating a lot of pipelines to produce official stats which could free-up time to work on more interesting things, overall slow pace except in niche teams, lack of integration with other govt department which leads to duplicated research, and sometimes you don't know how your work is being used or how to make it most relevant - no direct impact/policy function to work this out with you