This question was triggered by an article I read a while ago about Dominic Cummings’ plans to reform the UK Civil Service (it was widely covered in the media): [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50978329](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50978329). Basically, what Cummings calls for is a civil service that attracts people that are interested in working on hard problems (from a range of scientific backgrounds).

My question to you is this: looking at the Belgian (or Flemish) civil service; are there any actually interesting or challenging jobs to be found there (reading Cummings you would think that those are rather scarce anywhere)? With ‘interesting’ I mean jobs that actually allow people to focus on hard problems (requiring some sort of scientific or research background)? Curious about your thoughts and also to hear from people currently employed as civil servants.

3 comments

  1. A lot of researchers are paid more or less directly by the government at both European and regional level and the government gives broad directions on what to work (climate change, renewables, etc.)

    It’s called a university and the reason why Cummings can’t connect the dots, is because he only knows the private British universities and he can’t fathom public funded universities to start with.

  2. Tons of them. I worked for a big city administration. On bachelor of master level there were project coordinators who were involved with innovating our libraries, digitalizing their collection. We had architects looking how to use our public space or reuse old abandoned churches. We had people called “buurtregisseurs” who try to mantain peace and order within their district together with local actors. Business analists, cultuurcoordinators, etc etc. As I said, plenty of interesting jobs.

  3. The actual civil servants jobs are not that interesting, however you have a lot of institutions that are offering services to the government (eg Imec and our universities) and those are off course interesting.

    Civil servants are there for administration, if you want innovation and engineering you need to look elsewhere.

Leave a Reply