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Originally Posted by Unregistered
My husband is Deputy Director at a Stat Board in his late 30's. How I wish you were right... More like SGD 150k per annum including the civil service bonus of 2 to 3 months each year. Increment is slow too. He has been getting guaranteed increment but it is so small... +4-6k/year.
Close to SGD200k is what we need for me to stop working and look after the kids fulltime.
He is a gov't scholar and was on Dean's List in NUS. Unfortunately he is not well connected. He says only "white horse" gets SGD 180k.
I never really understood what it means, can someone tell me what "white horse" means in this context? |
First of all, when you say your husband is a government scholar, what exactly does that mean? I realise these days a lot of people are claiming to be government scholars the moment they get some sort of sponsorship or monetary support for their studies from the government. What is important is not whether you are scholar, but whether you belong to the elite talent management program.
The traditional sense of the word “scholar” in civil service actually refers to Administrative Officers and its counterpart in the uniformed services - an elite group of people that the government look after their entire career needs including sponsoring them for further studies in ivy schools.
These elites generally work in the policy space of the civil service, hold senior command positions in the uniformed services and/or take up roles for stints within various stat boards in preparation to groom them into Permanent Secretaries, Ministers of State and Cabinet Ministers. Of course in real life there are not enough senior positions to satisfy everyone, so a lot of them end up as either Senior Directors/Dy Secretaries in Ministries, Stat Board Chief Executives or C-level positions in many GLCs.
Judging from your husband’s career progression so far, he seems to be following a typical “farmer” track, i.e. he isn’t on the fast track program nor is he a scholar in the true sense of the word in public sector. He might have gotten a scholarship or monetary support for his studies, but the powers on top do not see him any different from a normal degree educated Div 1 officer.
Dy Director is the default career end point for a degree educated average performer in the civil service. Your husband reaching this level in late 30s with an all-in package of 150k is probably slightly faster than average. The salary scale for DD is very wide to cater for most civil servants who will retire at this level.
If your husband is a consistent good performer (i.e. B+ and above), he might have a shot at making Director in his early 50s, otherwise DD is his career end just like most of us. Some stat boards are creating a fake level of SDD to recognize long service, but other than that, the job remains the same.
As for increments and bonus being too low, you should be grateful with what you have. A civil servant / stat board employee is funded by the tax payer and exists to serve the greater good of the society.
Sure, we don’t pay them shabbily and recognise that they need to maintain a decent lifestyle, but expecting to pay an average civil servant 200K+ so that his wife can retire early and the whole family can maintain an upper middle class on just 1 iron rice bowl income is just too greedy at a time when the government is pushing dual income earners to work until 67.