Civil service jobs

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I've noticed that, in the in-person adult ASD support groups I attend, a large minority of attendees have civil service jobs.

Historically, here in the U.S.A. at least, civil service jobs have long been a path to the middle class for unpopular minorities of all kinds.

Some relevant websites for U.S. federal civil service jobs:

- USAJOBS - online applications and info
- Civil Service Exams - required for some though not most federal jobs
- Federal Civil Service Exam Test Prep

As far as I am aware, civil service exams generally test actual relevant knowledge and skills. They are not the stupid personality tests that a lot of employers like to use these days.

I would suggest Googling for similar information regarding your local governments at the state, county, and city/town levels.

I don't know whether civil service has been discussed here at all recently, but I thought I should post this to bring people's attention to an option that some people here might not have considered.

One advantage of civil service jobs is that they are typically unionized, which means a lot more transparency regarding pay scales, job performance reviews, etc. -- and, of course, relatively good job security.

Also there is generally less emphasis on personalities and on fitting in socially than is typical in the private sector.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 31 May 2019, 4:59 pm, edited 5 times in total.

My father was a British civil servant . Last post he had was consul general for Atlanta. I'm guessing like in the UK you'd need to meet higher or lower standards depending on the civil service job.

The only other relevant-looking thread that popped up in "similar topics" after I posted this thread is: Civil service engineers?

I apply for civil service jobs and never hear back, despite my master's being in government lol. I did recently take the test to work for the TSA, passed it, and should be getting an interview soon...we'll see.

I agree that, in theory at least, autistics should have a better chance of both getting and keeping these jobs due to less focus on social skills.

Good luck with that. Hopefully you don't have the kinds of sensory issues that would make it difficult for you to work at a busy airport?

Baggage screening is one of those jobs that some autistic people, at least, are likely to be exceptionally good at. See TSA may have the perfect job for autistic workers. (I would imagine that this job probably wouldn't be particularly good for autistic people with co-occurring ADHD, though.)

I already work in the airport...it's not a busy one (you can PM me if you really want to know which one), but it does get busy sometimes.

I did a lot of years with federal and state government. In general, I can recommend government jobs - they tend to have fairly rigid frameworks, it's hard to get fired for minor things if there's an associated union, the pay levels are public, and for many positions the assessment processes are fairly fixed. Plus they tend to have less of the incredibly egregious behavioral s**t that shows up in the private sector - singing company songs, chanting slogans, wearing ridiculous outfits, and such.

That said, a couple of patterns showed up:

- back-office jobs have less public contact. It might seem obvious, but a huge number of office jobs in government have a public-facing component, even if only partially. Look for jobs away from public contact areas, and ideally in offices which don't have public-contact areas anywhere in the building.
- internal infrastructure jobs tend more towards break-fix, data entry, and processing, and I've found that the deeper your job is buried in the department, the less it's likely to be affected by surface-level issues. Some of my best jobs were as a specialist supporting centralized generalists who supported onsite staff who supported the front-liners who supported the public.
- jobs which involved plowing through an endless mountain of work tended to be safer and less prone to interruption. I really liked jobs where I was one of 20+ people all pulling similar tasks from a giant queue of work, all day long. I would almost never run out of work to be getting on with, so people would never really have a moment where they could interrupt me. And when the tasks were all fairly simple, it wasn't unexpected that you'd just come in, work, and go home, without management hovering over your shoulder all day.

Some things I should mention, though:

- promotion past a certain level - generally, promotion to middle management or generic high technical specialist positions - required far more social aspects, from having application referees to having to front up to interview panels in person, to having "create and maintain strong positive working relationships" on many of the application criteria. If you want to move up to a high-paying job in government, you tend to either need to be able to do the social relationship thing, or be skilled enough to be hired as an external specialist contractor.