States can’t find senior secretaries

Saturday 14th June 2008, 9:55AM BST.

THE States have struggled to recruit locally qualified Islanders to senior secretarial roles for the last few years, it has emerged.

Head of States human resources Ian Crich (pictured) said that it had been difficult to find candidates for demanding senior PA roles supporting chief officers and ministers.

He said that in some cases there had been no applicants for jobs advertised. And in others where only a few candidates have come forward they have fortunately been of sufficiently high quality for an appointment to be made.

As a result, work would now be carried out to recruit and retain staff for these key roles.

Mr Crich defended a decision to allow non-locally qualified people to apply for a senior States secretary’s job advertised last week.

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1
Mark

June 14, 2008 at 12:09 pm

He can not find the skills because the States of Jersey DO NOT give the correct people the correct training. There are Jersey born Staff within the civil service who have never been given the chance to be pushed forward and gain promotion. So instead we have to import the skills creating more issues with housing and cost of paying this people.
We have the workforce on island,. why not train them instead with the correct qualifications.

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2
GaryC

June 14, 2008 at 1:53 pm

For a number of years the States of Jersey opporated a Trainee Secretarial Scheme which produced a number of excellent members of staff, a number of whom went on to rise throughtout the service to achieve very high levels; those that left often followed the lure of very large salaries in the finance sector; however a number returned because they found the work in the private sector boring.

This was in comparision to the diversity available in their roles within the States , where they were rotated around different Departments on a six monthly basis.

The States can be rightly proud of the quality of its Secretarial staff and the support which it provides to them.

GaryC

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3
Jeremy Maçon

June 15, 2008 at 9:35 pm

Could it be that the States can’t recruit a PA locally because they aren’t offering a salary in line with the current market conditions? Perhaps if they took a few thousand pounds from the senior civil servants’ salaries they could then pay the rest of the States workers a fair wage? We wouldn’t then be faced with the threat of strike action just so that they could earn a decent living!

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