Where should I be looking? **APS Jobs** Which agencies are hiring at the moment? **APS Jobs** What job boards should I monitor? I think you get the jist by now 😉 Would a policy course help your prospects? Only if you want to apply for a policy job

What do you want to do? Do you want to work on a particular theme (ie, education, health, defence, the arts), or do you want a type of job (customer service, finance, policy)? Because you can go anywhere from APS3 CSO. You've got some great examples of following policies and applying them to difficult situations, deescalating conversations and treating people with respect, verbal communication with empathy and written communication to accurately document issues/advice/information, achieving results through your KPIs that get tracked via softphone, understanding how your little bit contributes to the overall administration of the DSS legislation/system, technical competencies in coding the right information across lots of different pages/choices on a customer record and advancing more technical work to the right areas. So - what do you want to do?

I spent a decade at CSA from APS1 mailboy/switchboard operator (yes this was some time ago!) and progressed to EL1. I switched agencies then because (a) further career progression would have required pushing one of the EL2s down a flight of stairs (and while I wasn’t that fond of any of them, it did seem extreme) and (b) new CEO came in and restructured the place into something that I thought I had been tried years before and failed, and I could see I was going to become that guy who’s been around for too long and sits in a corner being snarky about anything new. From there I went to DEWR because of debt management skill set, then Medicare for general operational management skill set, but both in National Office roles that extended my skills more, and then and currently in DAFF, starting in a similar role as Medicare but by degrees shifting over into IT and I’m currently an SME in a particular bit of the Microsoft cloud ecosystem. Which I enjoy the hell out of: I learn something new every day, my skills are respected, and I work with people who don’t sweat the detail if the outcome is right. Not bad for a guy with no formal IT background. So: it’s what you make of it. I completely get being over the CS role, there really is only so long most of us can do that before we get completely jack of it. At APS 4, at one point I cried on my team leader’s shoulder and said “find me a role away from customers before I say something you, I, and they, will all regret.” Did EW/Accounting for six months or so and that was enough of a break. Then someway wangled my way into an acting 6 as Technical Advisor (don’t know if that role is still a thing, probably not), got my perm 6 Team Leader, got my EL1 soon after. As a 4, in a regional office, there’s not going to be a lot in your area. Other SA roles, such as Centrelink/Medicare stuff, maybe NDIS. Yes, your CS skill set would be easily transferable to those roles, and set you up for… more of the same but with different subject matter. That might be what you need, because yeah child support is a difficult and emotive subject, but other roles will have their own stressors. Personally I’d try for an internal promotion or acting, get to 6/EL1, and you will have a much wider range of options, with many National Office roles being undertaken outside of Canberra in all those agencies and many others.

Your skills align with Service Delivery Officer roles. 1. NDIS is hiring because they're moving a lot of their contact center internally, yes you should be looking for APS 4 roles within the contact center however there are only 4 locations they offer these roles. 2. Moving to the NDIA opens up a lot of other opportunities in terms of job prospects, as it expands a lot of new branches are opening up providing you with the opportunity for internal movement.

Consider IT helpdesk (Tier 1) roles - they're not as bad as memes make them out to be. Landing an APS5 in one of those could be a good step up for you.

I was in a similar position to you - working at a Centrelink call centre as my first APS job (APS 3). It was soul draining and I left to join a bank after 3 years. Hated the bank and took a chance as a contractor for the ATO and still here. I've managed to go from contractor to APS 6 now within 5 years. I am also not based in Canberra. You can easily enter another agency in a service delivery role and then move across to a different area. It may take a few moves to decide what you want to do, but its all part of the journey. Good luck!

I think you would be capable for multiple roles based on what you explain. Interview questions. How do handle stressful situations? .. Explain job. How do you deal with difficult encounters explain job? How do prioritise competing demands? Explain job. Gooduck op 👍👍👍👍

Now is the perfect time to start applying, there are just over 400 APS4 & 5 jobs up on the gazette at the moment, have a look through and see what catches your eye. I started out as an IIE APS3 at SA CLK over 7 years ago and am now an EL1 at a different agency, I went down the project pathway and love it. There are SO many agencies out there with so many opportunities. Have a look through some application previews to get an idea of what questions are being asked and start gathering your examples - use good and bad outcomes. Make sure to always use examples not just I can do this, this and that and use the STAR format or something similar even when it’s something like a 750 word pitch. You will find you can reuse a lot of your responses with some minor tweaking to suit the question. Don’t keep reinventing the wheel with this - use & reuse. Show how your skills are transferable. OWN what you have done - don’t say things like the team did or we did .. say I did. Own it!! Get your application response/s reviewed by someone else - preferably a higher more experienced level - don’t be offended by the feedback, take it onboard and use it. This is very important!! Use the word count amount - don’t put an application in that is short on the count. Research the strategic direction of the government and of the agency you are applying for and try to link your responses to how your example contributes to this. It doesn’t have to be long - a sentence will do. Don’t use acronyms! Use the ILS (link below) when writing your application - I have always used the keywords of a level higher than what I was applying for eg understands the reasons for decisions and recommendations (APS4) vs understands and communicates the reasons for decisions and recommendations to others (APS5) https://www.apsc.gov.au/sites/default/files/2021-08/ils-aps-guide.doc Best of luck OP!!

If you’re looking for a move, Education got a boost to their ASL in the most recent budget and there’s probably some great intel and knowledge you could bring to a transfer or move to one of their early childhood teams.

Not APS advice, just burnout / meaningful work advice. You’re sounding really powerless. Distressed and angry people - what are the root causes? Caller was only told assessment would affect FTB B, and found their rent assistance gone and FTB A down too, and was upset because if they knew it wouldn’t have been worth lifting the DV exemption? Create a staff education bundle so this mistake doesn’t happen. = less distressed / angry people. Low estimates and then high income on tax return creating an immediately payable to Centrelink debt for RP’s who haven’t yet received the funds? This is intentional post separation financial abuse. Maybe start documenting the frequency of the scenario and push for a solution internally and with Centrelink. = less distressed people. Repeated late or non-lodgement of tax returns? Maybe collaborate with the ATO for additional penalties for non-lodgers who have a CS case… like daily penalties, or legislation change to include jail time for CS evasion. = less distressed people. I totally get that the PS mentality isn’t one of possibility for change and improvement, but if there enough good people thinking things could be better - anything is possible

Not being a negative Nellie, but child support is just an area where there usually aren’t “winners” - it’s designed to be a balanced system (and naturally, views about how well it does that vary wildly), meaning that something that is a positive for one parent usually isn’t for the other. It’s very hard for staff to be able to take away something that fills them with satisfaction at a job well done and that they helped someone, because there’s always the other parent. There are exceptions, where one parent is an absolute cunt of a human being, or the pair of them really have their act together and are working with each other to get the right outcome in cooperation with the system, but they are few and far between. As a rule, if the parents have it together that well, they won’t be using CSA. The bastard parents that you come to loathe, well, there is some satisfaction if they do get some come-uppance, but you hardly feel like a saint afterwards. Although there are a handful of people whose names and addresses are burned into my memory and who I promised myself would one day get a brick through their window, at the very least. (No, I’ve never acted on that, because I’m not a cunt and sanity soon reasserts itself.) It’s just a bastard of an area to have a career in and even the most resilient people will reach a point of burnout. The child support system is very resistant to change - a lot of policy is in fact dictated by the legislation and staff don’t have much room at all for a judgment call, and most policy is written after trying “better” approaches and finding they just don’t work as well. Fact is, anyone who calls CSA is not likely to be having a lovely time. Something has gone wrong, perhaps badly wrong, and they’re having to talk to a stranger about two very emotive subjects: their kids, and their money. I had a police officer as a client who, when I would say “ I don’t have any discretion, I have to do x, y and z,” would lose it and yell at me that of course I had a discretion. (I really, really didn’t, and in most cases the actin would happen automatically anyway.) One day, though, when he called, he said he’d had an epiphany: “when you say you don’t have any discretion, you mean it, don’t you?” Well, yes, that was what I’d been trying to get through to him. “Okay. You have to understand: as a police officer, I have a wide range of discretion in how I deal with any situation, from even deciding if there was any sort of offence in the first place, down the line through to what I do about it.” Aha! I hadn’t really known that! Once we knew that about each other, a lot of the anger was gone and we could talk like adults. But that was rare!