Compare civil service salary

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Originally Posted by Unregistered

does anyone already know the annual salary increment / promotion increments for civil servants for this year already? If so, can share the details? tks.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

i personally find my job quite interesting. basically you are in charge of a few areas of responsibilities in your portfolio, and you deal with policy recommendations and proposals in that portfolio. for e.g. you might identify a gap in the current policy for xx area, and you can staff up a paper for discussion and subsequent implementation. You must be ready to defend your recommendations though! You might also have to react quickly to emergency situations and think on your feet (e.g. calls from your bosses at 1am) . You get to go for inter-agency meetings (this is both good and bad) and staff your bosses on calls/trips. you also go for seminars and courses to strengthen your knowledge in the area.

of course, not everything is rosy. There are mundane stuff like minutes writing, preparing logistics for calls, looking at legislation etc etc. working with slow colleagues can also get frustrating, or when you get bogged by red tape. but i guess every job has its goods and bads, just that we need to be okay with it.

I don't understand why the mundane stuff can't be done by the admin colleagues...even university grads also have to take care of the mundane stuff in addition to the more important matters such as working on policies? I mean, taking minutes of meetings? You don't need a university degree to do that, for crying out loud...

Not ranting at you, just ranting at how it seems like such a waste of one's education to be taking minutes...

hi im currently looking to apply for NEA's NEW scholarship which has a four year bond
anyone has any idea what would be the pay and job offered during the bond?
assuming male with ns with chemistry degree from ntu second upper or second lower
thanks in advanced!

you probably do not understand the importance of minutes taking. wait till u are in civil service, if you do get in, and you will find out what it is all about.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I don't understand why the mundane stuff can't be done by the admin colleagues...even university grads also have to take care of the mundane stuff in addition to the more important matters such as working on policies? I mean, taking minutes of meetings? You don't need a university degree to do that, for crying out loud...

Not ranting at you, just ranting at how it seems like such a waste of one's education to be taking minutes...

Originally Posted by Unregistered

i personally find my job quite interesting. basically you are in charge of a few areas of responsibilities in your portfolio, and you deal with policy recommendations and proposals in that portfolio. for e.g. you might identify a gap in the current policy for xx area, and you can staff up a paper for discussion and subsequent implementation. You must be ready to defend your recommendations though! You might also have to react quickly to emergency situations and think on your feet (e.g. calls from your bosses at 1am) . You get to go for inter-agency meetings (this is both good and bad) and staff your bosses on calls/trips. you also go for seminars and courses to strengthen your knowledge in the area.

of course, not everything is rosy. There are mundane stuff like minutes writing, preparing logistics for calls, looking at legislation etc etc. working with slow colleagues can also get frustrating, or when you get bogged by red tape. but i guess every job has its goods and bads, just that we need to be okay with it.

Hello, I'm a fresh grad graduating in May and I'll entering the civil service after that doing policy-related work. The job description sounds like what you are doing so I was wondering if you can tell me a bit more about what your job involves. e.g. do you get any form of training when you first started work? do you normally work as a team or just your individual portfolio?

Originally Posted by Unregistered

you probably do not understand the importance of minutes taking. wait till u are in civil service, if you do get in, and you will find out what it is all about.

The person who originally posted the comment probably doesn't appreciate what it takes to draft good minutes either.

I have had many painful hours vetting and amending crappy minutes from my staff (who are uni grads). Going by the way they write, you'd think some of them were doing transcripts!

Taking minutes entails not only noting the main discussion points that have taken place, but also understanding its essence, significance and even intricacies. Do you know what kind of meetings necessitates minutes taking and the people who sit in it? And do you know who may read the minutes of the meeting? If you really think it is a no brainer, you can't be further away from the truth. It requires a very sharp mind to discern the facts from the unimportant stuff. And good command of English is only one of the many prerequisites of good minutes writing.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

I don't understand why the mundane stuff can't be done by the admin colleagues...even university grads also have to take care of the mundane stuff in addition to the more important matters such as working on policies? I mean, taking minutes of meetings? You don't need a university degree to do that, for crying out loud...

Not ranting at you, just ranting at how it seems like such a waste of one's education to be taking minutes...

Originally Posted by Unregistered

you probably do not understand the importance of minutes taking. wait till u are in civil service, if you do get in, and you will find out what it is all about.

I am NOT disputing the importance of taking minutes. I am just saying that one doesn't need a university education to take minutes, AND that, to me it seems that university graduates could be doing more high-level stuff.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

The person who originally posted the comment probably doesn't appreciate what it takes to draft good minutes either.

I have had many painful hours vetting and amending crappy minutes from my staff (who are uni grads). Going by the way they write, you'd think some of them were doing transcripts!

Not sure how you arrived at this conclusion. Just because I think university grads shouldn't be taking minutes, does not mean that I don't appreciate what it takes to draft high quality minutes. The correlation isn't really there. I question your level of logical thinking and reasoning, and I worry that someone like you has been put in charge of vetting and amending, in your own words, "crappy minutes", because with you can't even make a simple correlation properly, so perhaps you aren't as good as you make yourself out to be.

Get off your high horse.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Taking minutes entails not only noting the main discussion points that have taken place, but also understanding its essence, significance and even intricacies. Do you know what kind of meetings necessitates minutes taking and the people who sit in it? And do you know who may read the minutes of the meeting? If you really think it is a no brainer, you can't be further away from the truth. It requires a very sharp mind to discern the facts from the unimportant stuff. And good command of English is only one of the many prerequisites of good minutes writing.

I don't think I said that taking minutes was a "no-brainer".

But thanks for clarifying that minute taking is such an important task in the government. Hopefully adequate training is provided so that these minute takers don't screw up and embarrass their bosses. Of course, at the same time this also means potentially thousands of dollars being spent per year on training govt staff to take minutes. I wonder how the general public would feel about that if it were true.