Pros
Working at Austrade provides you with the opportunity to work in a globally engaged organisation on some really interesting projects and with a lot of fascinating companies.
Cons
- Career opportunities: The current management have an obsession with hiring from outside the organisation and do not recognise or reward high performance. This has led within my team to the hiring of numerous externals over the advancement of highly skilled internals. The result of this bias to external skills in senior roles has been a number of poor cultural fits that have significantly increased staffing churn both from the poorly chosen externals and the internal staff that have been overlooked. - Compensation & Benefits: Austrade offers amongst the lowest pay for equivalent pay scales within the APS. This is particularly challenging in the more expensive cities of Sydney and Melbourne and has lead to the haemorrhaging of staff to better remunerated positions in state governments over the past two years. This is exacerbated by the above poor career opportunities many existing staff feel are now open to them. In fact, it is a common refrain that if you want to get ahead in Austrade it is better to leave and join a consulting firm favoured by the CEO first, rather than deepening your knowledge of Austrade. - Senior Management: The current CEO and upper management are utterly obsessed with buzz words and passing Silicon Valley organisational trends like ‘Agile’ and open plan offices that are either a poor fit for a large government bureaucracy or frankly are just not supported by evidence. What’s worse is if you are subjected to one of the CEO’s “Townhall” meetings where these concepts are being sold, it quickly becomes apparent that she doesn’t really understand them and neither do any of the lieutenant. Many staff who have been involved in implementing these systems I have known have left the organisation after becoming utterly disenchanted with their work. - Work/Life Balance The exodus of so much intellectual capital over the past 2 years has left both a gaping hole of skills within Austrade and support staff. This has led to remaining staff doing much longer hours and far greater stress on many teams and their managers. - Culture & Values Austrade’s written culture and values are excellent, but the management only pay lip service to them. The organisation proclaims to be in favour of inclusivity and openness, but the very nature of the activities CEO’s Town Hall meetings seem designed to quell dissent or negative feedback by ensuring management simply dictate to staff, rather than seeking their feedback. Moreover, previous members of senior management that have disagreed have all been quietly pushed out the door since the new CEO took control. The culture is now one of fear and anxiety at the higher levels and most lower level staff have communicated they don’t believe management gives a stuff about the people actually working there.
