Pros
Meaningful mission focused on supporting citizens and workforce development.
Strong institutional knowledge due to many long-serving officers.
Cons
WSG is not the first public sector agency I have worked in, so I thought I had already experienced the full spectrum of corporate bureaucracy. I was wrong.
Stepping into some of the corporate functions here feels like travelling back to the early 2000s. The organisation has so many long-serving staff at various levels that fresh perspectives are hard to come by. Instead of bringing in specialists for functions that most organisations consider professional disciplines, officers are often rotated from completely unrelated roles. The result is people administering specialised functions without the expertise, confidence, or authority to challenge outdated practices.
When processes stop making sense, the answer is rarely simplification. Instead, another layer gets added. Imagine a sinking ship where every leak is addressed by slapping on another patch without anyone asking whether the ship itself needs redesigning. Some controls may have been perfectly reasonable when introduced years ago, but circumstances evolve. Effective organisations periodically review and refine them. Here, processes seem to accumulate rather than improve.
The workforce model does not help. Many long-serving officers either move internally between functions or are seconded elsewhere before returning. The same people rotate around like a corporate game of musical chairs. While institutional knowledge is valuable, there comes a point when experience becomes insularity. Too many people have spent so long within the same ecosystem that they have little exposure to how modern organisations operate outside it.
Interacting with some corporate functions can be an experience in itself. Conversations often feel less like discussions with professionals exercising judgment and more like interactions with a first-generation chatbot: inputs go in, standard operating procedure excerpts come out. Not the modern artificial intelligence-powered kind. The old kind that only knows one answer regardless of the question.
The practical consequence is that the rest of the organisation ends up spending excessive time complying with cumbersome paperwork requirements. Multiple forms, submissions, and approvals exist largely because previous forms, submissions, and approvals already existed. Meanwhile, I have worked in agencies that operate with significantly less administrative burden and achieve the same, if not better, governance outcomes.
What is most disappointing is that the recent merger represented a rare opportunity to fundamentally rethink processes and eliminate accumulated bureaucracy. Instead, the direction appears to be preserving and scaling existing practices. Frontline officers who should be focused on delivering value to citizens instead spend valuable time feeding internal administrative machinery.
If you are someone who enjoys challenging convention, simplifying processes, and modernising ways of working, be prepared for an uphill battle. If your dream job is maintaining spreadsheets that justify other spreadsheets, you will feel right at home.