Reading your post, I cannot help but be astounded by the similarities between your situation and mine- especially the part where the though of breaking a bond never crossed the mind and the reasons which finally prompted the decision to do it.

Thank you for sharing…

For scholars who served, partially or full, and left, for positive or negative reasons, the organization would have little reasons to bear grudges. In fact, it is healthy for an organization to maintain a certain attrition rate. It is not like Google has no leavers. Some firms even call their leavers “alumni” and celebrate the network members’ subsequent success — I think that is a better perspective.

Good luck with your next endeavor!

People come and go for different reasons from the public sector. The bureaucracy is more suited to manage the status quo than to really think out of the box as policy options are constrains by certain political and other considerations. But overall, the public sector has improved over time but it can still be cut 10-15% (in the middle) and still be effective.

And that is what I’ve found out firsthand too – that the bureaucracy is better at managing status quo, while our top bureaucrats and political leaders, who are distilled from the populace via various yardsticks, are tasked with the heavy burden of “thinking out of the box” and worrying endlessly for the future of our tiny nation.

I guess it’s just unfortunate that many of us didn’t have the full picture before penning our name to our deeds. But then again, there is also much that could be said for us not to have done more to find out when we were about to make those difficult decisions back then.

I fulfilled my bond of 5 years (during my time it was 6 years for local scholarships and 8 years for overseas but the give you a “discount” for full-time National Service) and left soon after.

Contrary to what most think, not all scholars rocket up the salary scales with rapid promotions and plum assignments. It took me 5 years to be promoted and my PS told me was not because I was not performing well relative to my cohort but because the other more senior colleagues would be “jealous” if he promoted me faster than the norm!

That 5 years was not wasted as I did acquire many accountancy related technical skills as well as some team management. But after leaving the civil service, joining a GLC allowed me to taste the more private sector way of doing things of delivering results and no-one bothered how they were achieved so long as no laws were broken.

I left partly because at that time, the talent management policies were abysmal. I would be a frog in the well and would never expose myself to different sectors and pick up new skills (which I did over the 5-7 years in my career) before now I am back in a statutory board at a senior level.

People come and go for different reasons from the public sector. The bureaucracy is more suited to manage the status quo than to really think out of the box as policy options are constrains by certain political and other considerations. But overall, the public sector has improved over time but it can still be cut 10-15% (in the middle) and still be effective.

The “Some people are better suited at playing the game than others” response actually makes me very angry. That’s because I see it as part of a thought pattern that is stifling change in organisational culture in the civil service. By framing the civil service as a “game”, those who are unhappy in it are implicitly “losers”, and those who can cope better, “winners”. The feedback from the “losers” can then be ignored as coming from people who do not really understand the game. Meanwhile, feedback from the “winners” is taken more seriously, and unsurprisingly, this tends to be feedback that does not really rock the boat (that’s why they are good at the game, after all).

In other words, they defend their alienation of large numbers of talented people by defining success such that people who are unhappy are not successful and hence not worth listening to. This in effect insulates the civil service from critical self-examination. It also trivialises what I am increasingly coming to think of as a huge waste of human potential. I meet a disturbing number of extremely talented people who are either plotting to leave the system or have already left it. Because these people won’t play the game, their departures are trivialised. It’s the old “quitters” trick all over again in a different guise. By labelling those who leave “quitters”, one implicitly suggests that these are the ones who lack determination or patriotism anyway, and hence are inferior to the “stayers”. It immediately frames the question in such a way that few think to go on and ask how exactly they are inferior to the stayers.