Discovering Higher and Degree Apprenticeships with UWE Bristol, get free advice >>

Surge and Rapid response team offer

Scroll to see replies

That is strange as I know someone else who applied at the same time who has been given a start date for next week? It is all over the place.

From what I've been told, they are looking at the workload on a weekly basis and giving out start dates according to how many people they need at one time. I imagine that the shifting of the Brexit date has had a huge impact on this recruitment process, as it has with the whole of the Civil Service.

Reply 221

Anonymous2k

Can anyone provide me with any insight into the training we receive during the first few weeks of the role?

Reply 222

wr72

Thanks for the insight EngineeringOr.

I have been given a start date but while I was waiting for pre-employment checks clearing (which took 4 months) I accepted another position within HMRC. I don’t know what the level transfer policy is in my department but I have worked there under 2 weeks so they may let me go.

Anyway, my biggest concern was the telephony assignments. I applied to Surge to travel the country and do make a difference in important assignments, not to be a call centre worker. Like you said, locations may differ but I’m in Scotland so far enough away from London to be given menial tasks.

The other thing that concerned me was that they do not carry out SC (security checks) until you have started the job. Have you heard of anyone who failed and then had to leave?

I am now considered an internal candidate even though I applied and was interviewed before I took up my current position so cannot now be given a start date until I pass SC.

Just don’t know what to do. I’m 80% on the side of staying where I am and rejecting the job offer.

Original post by EngineeringOr

Weird thread for me to stumble across. I'm an ex-Surge team member. Worked from it's inception in 2015 up until recently but left on promotion.
If you want honest feedback, here's my feelings towards the "organisation" and what is currently happening with it thanks to insight from colleagues who are still there. Please be aware, this feedback is my specific experience based on the location I worked from and your own experiences may be vastly different as it appears that each location was managed very differently.

For me the Surge team started with a lot of variety and exciting deployments. I got to work at the Foreign Office next to Downing Street, I worked abroad on an international crisis, at the Home Office in Croydon etc. for several weeks at a time (I'm not based in London for reference). This was fantastic, but on the other side, there were a lot of monotonous deployments that were telephony ones for Tax Credits or other departments, or very menial data processing jobs. From a friend who works there currently, there's a feeling that too many offices have opened and too many other Surge staff have been recruited - there's been quite a few times over the past year or so they have been sitting without an actual deployment and the management have scrabbled around finding them absolutely anything to do.

I initially began applying for jobs because the work wasn't at all stretching, there appeared to be no direction at all from Senior Leadership and I found that as I wasn't London based my deployments became increasingly more stints of Tax Credits telephony.

All in all, that's my experience based on one specific location and it's entirely possible the other locations are completely different - I rarely saw other locations and when I did we had very little interaction. If the locations you have applied for are anything like my first year or so in Surge it'll be great, lots of travel and some interesting deployments. If it's anything like the time after that, I wouldn't recommend unless you're utilising it to get your foot in the door of the Civil Service to then move elsewhere internally. If you have questions, feel free to ask.