The government's over-reliance on Canberra as a talent pool and internal recruitment for public service leadership roles poses "significant risk" amid the national skills shortage, a taskforce of the nation's top public servants has found.
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New Commonwealth figures from the latest State of the Service report revealed worker turnover in the Australian Public Service has skyrocketed to one in 12 public servants departing their agency in one year and leaving having given fewer years of service.
A majority of public servants believe they're fairly compensated for their work, the 2022 APS Employee Census results showed, but the number who disagree has risen by 5 per cent since 2021 as cost of living, interest rate, energy price rises dominated national debate. A similar shift was seen in public servants who felt their skills were not being utilised at work.
The public service was facing acute worker shortages in ICT, data analysis, accounting, engineering and security, program and project management, HR and legal fields.
Many APS employees, particularly those within in-demand occupations, could receive a higher salary in the private sector, which the new employee census results identified as an increasing justification for wanting to leave.
The public sector union said the findings show a lot of work was needed to make the APS a competitive employer and the model employer it should be.
"If we want the Australian Public Service to attract the best of the best, then things need to change," CPSU national secretary Melissa Donnelly said.
"We need to get wages moving, we need to make progress on flexibility and working from home arrangements, we need to open up public sector employment opportunities to people outside of Canberra and we need to put an end to the outsourcing of public sector work."
But while the labour shortage was expected to ease eventually, the taskforce was concerned with systemic problems in how the public service replenishes itself.
Public Service Commissioner Peter Woolcott said the government was alert to how the APS has lost a natural advantage in competing with other sectors for workers as those sectors caught up to flexible working as the new normal amid pandemic shifts.
"We are focusing our efforts on enhancing our Employee Value Proposition by exploring options around location and flexibility," he said.
"This includes measured steps towards more modern structures and ways of working, accelerating work on culture and capability."
Nearly a quarter of staff (23 per cent) say their workload is well above capacity, and a third (32 per cent) say they feel burned out. Both responses have stayed consistent through the pandemic.
More than half (55 per cent) said they had worked from home in the past year.
APS growth in Canberra continues
Separation rates returned to pre-pandemic levels, with more than 11,000 public servants quitting over the past financial year. However, they were overtaken by new appointments of just over 18,000 workers, around half of whom had never worked in government before. That pushed continued growth (3.8 per cent) of the Commonwealth's workforce to 159,469 workers.
Just over 60,000 of these public servants are in Canberra, with the remainder located proportional to population in the states and Northern Territory.
Canberra cannot be the first option agencies look to fill key positions, Mr Woolcott said. Half of all recruits were public service transfers and four out of five of those transfers were Canberra-based.
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The public service executive levels and bands, EL and SES, were nearly always internally filled and recruitment did not target in-demand occupations where the workers were located, specifically NSW, Victoria and Queensland.
"This means the APS is missing out on opportunities to source talent, especially for in demand occupations. It also risks not better reflecting the diversity of the community it services if these narrow recruitment actions prevail," the report stated.
The senior executive service bands 1, 2 and 3 were filled via internal promotion or inter-agency transfer 84 per cent, 82 per cent and 88 per cent of the time, respectively.
Across all APS recruitment in the past year, 39 per cent of new hires came from the private sector and 6 per cent from the not-for-profit sector.
Mr Woolcott said his State of the Service Report was about building for the future, accelerating APS reform and ensuring it reflects and connect with the changing Australian community.
"The APS touches upon every aspect of the lives of Australians. This is a great responsibility and one we continue to carry out with integrity and professionalism," Mr Woolcott said.
Progress towards moving in step with the Australian community included greater parity between men and women at senior levels, and almost a quarter of APS employees being born outside of Australia (22.7 per cent) or speaking a first language other than English (23.3 per cent).
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Harley Dennett
Former federal politics bureau chief for the Canberra Times, via a career that's taken me from rural Victoria to Washington DC. Telling the stories of my local LGBTI community brought me to political journalism, where I've covered eight budgets, four national elections in two countries, Defence, public service and international governance.
Former federal politics bureau chief for the Canberra Times, via a career that's taken me from rural Victoria to Washington DC. Telling the stories of my local LGBTI community brought me to political journalism, where I've covered eight budgets, four national elections in two countries, Defence, public service and international governance.
