- Description
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The Australian Public Service Commission is a central agency within the Australian Public Service (APS) with a leadership role in contributing to the future capability and sustainability of the APS.
Section 44 of the Public Service Act 1999 provides that the Australian Public Service Commissioner must issue a report each year for presentation to the Australian Parliament. The report must include a report on the state of the APS during the year.
The State of the Service Report 2010–11 contains information on changing workforce trends and organisational capability. It details the human resource management practices and other activities of APS agencies.
The report draws on a range of information but one of its main data sources is the State of the Service employee survey. The 2010–11 employee survey involved a stratified random sample of 17,326 APS employees from agencies with at least 100 APS employees. A total of 10,222 valid responses were received, representing a response rate of 59%.
Three publications were produced by the Commission in association with the State of the Service Report 2010–11:
• Australian Public Service Statistical Bulletin 2010–11
• State of the Service 2010–11 Employee Survey Results
• State of the Service 2010–11 At a Glance.
These publications are available at: <http://www.apsc.gov.au/stateoftheservice/index.html>. A copy of the employee survey instrument is included in the State of the Service 2010–11 Employee Survey Results publication.
In addition, reports on the State of the Service employee survey results by state/territory and by agency size have been prepared for 2010-11 and are available at: <http://www.apsc.gov.au/stateoftheservice/>.
- Download
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- Online SOSR Employee Database 2011.sav (Other) 3.15MB - 173 hits
- Online SOSR Employee Database 2011.xlsx (Other) 10.44MB - 204 hits
- Date Published
- 24 November 2011
- Date Updated
- Not specified
- Update Frequency
- Annually
Dataset Information
- data.gov.au Category
- Employment, Government
- Keywords / Tags
- APS, APS Values, APSC, APSED, capability, Code of Conduct, diversity, employee engagement, human resources, innovation, job satisfaction, leadership, learning and development, performance management, recruitment, retention, staff survey, State of the Service, Web 2.0, wellbeing
- Licence
- Creative Commons - Attribution 3.0 Australia (CC BY 3.0)
- Permalink
- http://data.gov.au/6075
Contributing Agency Information
- Agency
- Australian Public Service Commission (View all datasets from Australian Public Service Commission)
- Jurisdiction
- Commonwealth of Australia
- Agency Program
- State of the Service Report
Dataset Coverage
- Temporal Coverage
- 2010-11 Financial Year
- Geospatial Coverage
- Australia
- Granularity
- Stratified random sample of all Australian Public Service (APS) employees (ongoing and non-ongoing) in agencies with at least 100 APS employees.
I appreciate that publishing the State of the Service Report results to data.gov.au is a start. However, the results are hardly presented in an accessible manner. OK for statisticians, but what about the public? A small start would be to use textual column headings rather than question numbers and response scale text rather than numeric values. Little things help.
The major point, however, is that the public service is a mysterious black box to many people. So why not do more to make it less so when publishing quantitative data? So the challenge here is balance – and that is not something achieved by simply placing statistics on data.gov.au
It’s a tad ugly I know, but the Canadian Public Service sets a better example. As, indeed they do by publishing results by individual agency – example.
To get somewhere with this we really need to grasp the mettle in relation to accessibility at a technical and conceptual level. This also relates to intent. If the intent of publishing this data is to provide a window on the public service, and invite the public to contribute in a positive way, then this exercise is lacking. It is no good if the way information is presented makes it onerous for people to ‘play’.
I am sympathetic to the APSC and believe that it needs to be resourced more appropriately to engage the community with its’ data holdings for the betterment of APS agencies. To a considerable extent this boils down to issuing the invitation and going some way towards inviting the community with a palatable means to explore and contribute. So design is important.
Steve Davies
Founder, OZloop