You could always try working for the Department of Finance
This is not a great time to be working in the public service: there are plans to reduce staff levels from 300,000 currently to 282,500 by the end of 2015 and this is amid another period of austerity, as the government looks to cut spending by €1.4bn next year.
The Department of Finance is not excluded from these cuts and is currently "engaged in a strategic transformation", which will see staff numbers cut in the Office of the Revenue Commissioners and "new efficiencies" rolled out in the Office of the Comptroller & Auditor General. Yes, the government has started using the sort of language usually reserved for redundancy announcements in the banking sector.
There are, however, opportunities. As part of its two-day budget announcement, the Department of Finance has said that it needs to "focus on the critical skills of banking, financial services and economic management".
What this essentially means is that Department of Finance is looking to spend a little money on upgrading its ICT systems in order to reduce the current manual administrative burden and move around 100 people away from transactional processing and on to more value add compliance roles.
At the same time, it needs to recruit more banking and financial services expertise for “key specialist functions” to deal with the "major policy changes" needed meet the requirements of the IMF/EU programme Ireland signed up to last year.
"Such challenges include the reform of the banking system, meeting increasingly onerous developments from the EU in relation to financial services, compliance with the EU/IMF Programme and deepen Ireland's interaction with the EU and other international institutions," it says.
If you fancy a move to the public sector, it's likely to necessitate a pay cut. However, as the popularity of the roles available at the Central Bank of Ireland and NAMA demonstrates, many financial services professionals are motivated by the prospect of being part of the fundamental restructuring of the sector.
