Many people often ask the question: who are government employees? Government employees, or civil servants, are people who work in a country's executive, judicial and legislative system.
In the United States, the list of government employees in the civil service includes all people working in both the Competitive service and the Excepted Service. The majority of those people work under Competitive, but there are certain categories (diplomacy, FBI, and National Security positions) that are under the Excepted Service.
The Sub-categories
All federal government employees work under one of the independent agencies or in one of the 15 executive departments. Apart from these, there are also many other organizations that are a part of the Executive Office of the President.
The organization
When it comes to Federal employment, all applications are processed by the Office of Personal Management (OPM), which is the government's HR agency. OPM is there to provide up-to-date information and ensure that the civil service remains free of any outside influence; this means that all employees have to be carefully selected, treated solely on the basis of merit, and subjected to thorough pre-employment background checks.
Work positions
There are literally thousands of jobs in the civil service sector. Each position is closely defined with a series of regulations. These indicate the number of skills, the amount of experience, and the required education for each position. The civil service has en elaborate grading system; the grades are there to define:
- The complexity of the work at a certain position
- The amount of the salary (the salary increases with the grade)
Federal civilian jobs are typically in the competitive service. If an applicant wants to obtain a position working on a Federal job, he/she is subject to open competition, with other applicants.
Once an applicant is hired by the Federal Government, a temporary, term or career-conditional appointment is assigned to that applicant. A temporary appointment is limited to one year; a term appointment is assigned work that is to be done on a specific project that can last up to four years; a career-conditional appointment serves as the first step towards receiving a job in the Federal Service. After a three-year period of service, employees that are under career-conditional service receive career status. For those employees who decide to leave the Federal service after achieving this status, there is an opportunity of being reinstated by agencies at any future point in time.
The job of protecting the rights of federal employees (and their families) falls onto the National Association of Government Employees.
Work schedules
All regular civil servants work full-time, part-time or on intermittent schedule (sporadic work with no fixed or guaranteed schedules). In addition to this, nearly every agency has to have a program for part-time employment, which means that any job can be filled by a part-time employee, if it would meet the needs of the agency.
Benefits
All civil servants are entitled to the following benefits:
- Reinstatement Eligibility
- Transitional leave without pay
- Highest previous rate
Government employees also enjoy other types of benefits, such as no-cost Medicare at the age of 65, Federal Employment Health Benefits Program, 13 days of sick leave each year, 10 days of paid holiday each year, etc.
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