A bold bid by the Australian Public Service (APS) to become a model employer where people genuinely aspire to work has been dealt with another free cultural and feasibility assessment after a key survey of government tech workers by Professionals Australia (PA) found a yawning gap in pay, career prospects and major issues with bullying.
In what must be rated as one of the most bleak snapshots of internal APS tech capability in the past 20 years, the technical and engineering union has confirmed a growing industry perception that IT professionals working in government are looked down upon and often shunned by their clerical peers.
As a union representing around 20,000 workers in IT, engineering, science, mining, pharmacy, management, architecture, language translation and interpreting, the Professionals Australia Employment and Remuneration Trends for Tech, Software and IT Professionals survey polls around 1,500 respondents and compares sectoral performance.
The survey is highly regarded as a solid barometer in that it takes the temperature of the middle and rear of the tech industry rather than its sometimes giddy heights.
With private-sector tech wages still on a bit of a run (IT budgets often increase ahead of an economic or cyclical downturn) the public sector has been left at the bus stop.
“Public sector Tech and IT professionals received a median annual salary increase of 2.0%, while private sector employees received almost three times this increase, at 5.8%. Growth in wages for Tech and IT professionals in the private sector outperformed overall wage growth across Australia as measured by the Wage Price Index (WPI), which increased by 3.7% in the 12 months to March 2023.
“This annual salary growth, however, was not enough to keep pace with the cost of living, which increased by 7.0% over the same period as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI),” the PA research found.
And it gets worse.
“As a result, the majority of Tech and IT professionals experienced a decline in real wages. Tech and IT professionals working in the public sector were most affected, with the median annual salary increase of 2.0% among respondents being well below the corresponding public sector WPI figure of 3.0%,” PA found.
“This highlights the recruitment and staff retention challenge the public sector faces when remuneration is not competitive. IT staff shortages are particularly problematic because many critical public sector services and projects rely on IT skills, which must be outsourced at increased costs.”
The dirge here is as familiar as it is true.
Public sector pay for IT professionals is so comparatively bad against private industry the skills shortage propels itself.
Services Australia has revealed that the pay gap for IT developers between public and private sectors is around $100,000 a year.
Add to that a stubborn refusal by the Australian Public Service Commission and the Community and Public Sector Union to let go of a strict clerical hegemony and classification system and the cultural effects lead to an interesting place: how do you insource work when your pay and culture are more crap than the outsourcer?
The pay is only one issue. While the PA survey makes observations about how the general tech employment sector is bifurcating in terms of heritage and remuneration (read speculative money chases shiny objects), public sector culture is also an issue.
Seems that beating up on the nerd is still a thing.
“Being excluded was the most common anti-social behaviour reported by Tech and IT professionals responding to the survey. Experiencing exclusion in the workplace during the previous 24 months was much more common among Tech and IT professionals employed in the public sector than in the private sector,” the PA survey found.
“Discrimination and bullying were also more common in the public sector. Almost three times as many public sector employees reported experiences of bullying over the previous 24 months compared to private sector employees.”
And, if you’re not a bloke, well, you picked it: it’s worse. (Although the results were not specific to the public sector, but rather the wider tech bro phenomenon.)
“Female tech and IT professionals were more likely than their male peers to report experiencing being excluded, discriminated against, or bullied in the workplace over the previous 24 months,” the PA survey found.
“Nonbinary/gender diverse tech and IT professionals were even more likely than women to report experiencing discrimination. Although sexual harassment was not common among any group, it was almost entirely reported by female and nonbinary/gender diverse professionals responding to the survey.”
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