One thing about being a ‘junior’ civil servant at a later stage in life, as opposed to being a younger college leaver, is that our career has been blossoming for some years and it is usually a case of being in the right place at the right time that has got us that raise or promotion.   However this is not necessarily the case when you become a public servant.    All ministeries and departments have a hierarchical management.  You generally get the foot soldiers who stay at the basic grade for their working life, quite unable to move out of that lowly sphere because of a lack of openings to move up into, allied with the lack of ‘get up and go’ to push through the ceiling.  Once the first promotion or mini raise has been achieved, it becomes a personal goal to see how far it is possible to climb within the very rigid development regime.  However there has been a sea change in the system over the last twenty years so that now all grades have to keep up their own records on career development.  It was a very hot topic over my last years of service.  Every year we had the dreaded personal improvement plan that had to be addressed to give an idea of where we thought we were at in year one and where we wanted to  e by year 5 and how we planned to achieve that.  Thought provoking and sometimes challenging but stopped most folk getting too stuck in the ruck.