Author: BK Vijay
Many of the graduates and post-graduates get really confused once they come out of the college, whether to apply for life style oriented private jobs or stable & comfortable government opportunities. Well, that is what most of the people think about private and public sector jobs right now when they consider and compare private and government jobs. Some people have passion to work in competitive surroundings and like to have challenges each & every day while others feel comfortable working in less creative environments.
If you are a person who had a career three to four decades back, then you would definitely disagree with the benefits of private sector because there were far less professional private sector companies present that time. But today, things have completely changed as more and more people are focusing on aggressive and energetic work environments where the professional growth is faster. Government jobs generally focus on addressing basic needs policy, utilities, basic citizen services like passport, ration cards etc. They also focus on tax collections etc. However, private sector jobs are opportunity oriented. For instance: there was no ministry for IT when IT industry was founded.
To be clear on this topic, let us discuss what makes private sectors more interesting than government jobs.
Private jobs are not meant for everyone especially not for comfort seeking professionals:
It’s really not easy for a highly potential person to survive and perform in a place where the environment is relaxed and less challenging like in most government jobs. Even though some people are motivated to work sincerely in government jobs, their efforts will gradually become ineffective because of less co-operation at the workplace. May be due to this reason, today many public sector organizations have turned out to be less efficient and poor performing institutions. Similarly, a person with comfort seeking mind-set feels very inconvenient to work in dynamic and target-driven private sector opportunities especially in service based industries.
After many failure attempts for Government sector jobs, some individuals come to private sector but still seeking same relaxed and congenial working style. As most of these high-end jobs are meant to be innovative at least to some extent, and demand competence & hard work, these people feel difficult to cope up with the challenging work environment and fail to perform as expected by the company.
Performance has direct impact on compensation:
Unlike the Government jobs where the compensation is stable irrespective of the performance, the income in private jobs solely depend on the competence. Those who are highly skilled and competent enough to excel in the jobs have higher probability of getting good compensation than those who are unqualified and have lower ability to perform. Most of the private sector firms make sure the compensation is aligned with the performance otherwise there is a chance of employee getting demotivated for not recognizing his/her efforts.
Performance driven Vs Stability
Many private sector jobs are posh involving working with refined customers and colleagues, unlike in govt where employees deal with all kinds of people. Also, there is a selective performance in govt jobs where only few govt VIPs or influential people are taken care which will not happen in private sector. Feedback is collected and then explanations are asked if same thing is done in private sector.
While some people may join the government sector for serving the country and make a difference. For a vast majority of applicants to the Govt job, the charm is a stable and comfortable lifetime job. It’s also not easy to get into a government job, as there is a lot of competition and getting through it is very difficult. However, this is seen only as a temporary challenge and many job seekers get a lot of support from their family as they try for years to obtain a government job. In some areas and families, a government job also ensures a good marriage match.
Private sector jobs are quite contrary, as there is a demand for performance and at same time, there is reward for performance. It encourages innovation, doing creative work, allowing expression of ideas into action, an enabling and achievement oriented environment giving great satisfaction from doing high quality work.
Many people do not realize the disadvantages of govt jobs
For some reason, many people do not realize the disadvantages of working in a govt job, and somehow try to get into it even if it is way below their qualification level. As we see, now-a-days even people with PG degrees are applying for government posts requiring intermediate qualification. Once people get into govt jobs they keep on changing their offices, work environment and colleagues as they get transfer to different locations very often. Sometimes they may have to work in remote locations even if it is not comfortable for their families. As far as private jobs are concerned, they are mostly in cities, and there is no need to worry about getting transferred to remote locations.