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TSR Wiki > Careers > Career Options > A-Z of Careers > Local Government

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Contents 1 Opportunities Available 2 Entry Requirments 3 Future Trends 4 Job Hunting 5 Opinions

Opportunities Available

People who work in local government are primarily responsible for the delivery of public services. They are not civil servants - who are servants of the Crown and are thus responsible to the government of the day. However, the range of jobs that public servants do is just as, if not more diverse than their civil service cousins.

There are a huge number of opportunities available across different areas from people who've left school with nothing all the way up to the most highly qualified and experienced MBA graduate. The website http://www.jobsgopublic.com/ will give you an idea of the sheer diversity of the sector and the numbers of opportunities available.

Entry Requirments

As above, it depends on what you are going for. For the National Graduate Development Programme - a bit like the Fast Stream but for local government, you need to have/be predicted a 2:1 in any field plus be able to work in the UK without a permit. Please see http://www.ngdp.co.uk/default.aspx for more information.

Future Trends

As with the fluctuations based on the economic and political cycles, the number of opportunities will vary. However, they will always be there short of the planet imploding. This is because local authorities have statutory duties that they are required to carry out. The chief executive of a london borough told me that being in his position was the opposite of being a newspaper proprietor - having all the responsibility but with no power. That said, the terms of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2006 takes away powers from Whitehall and gives them to local authorities and their delivery partners. This should make working in this field far more interesting as the old ringfences on budgets formerly imposed by Whitehall (i.e. central government telling local government how money should be spent irrespective of local priorities and issues) should become a thing of the past.

Job Hunting

See http://www.jobsgopublic.com/ or any of the employment agencies in your area.

Opinions

Anyone looking to go into any form of public sector administration should not see this as the Fast Stream's poorer cousin. The two are equal and the civil service is making it mandatory that civil servants should have experience in public sector delivery before they reach the senior civil service. Expect to see a lot more secondments coming from the centre - and te same number of people going the other way from local to central.

Many failures in public service delivery can in some part can be attributed in part to the lack of familiarity that civil servants have with local government - hence the move by the Cabinet Secretary to implement the policies that he has. The better the understanding the two have of each other, the more likely it is that civil servants will be able to pull each other up - and their ministers, before policies that tread over the the new local government performance framework (covered in parts of the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2006) see the light of day.