A State Job Is Perfect for Laid Back Mid-Aged Professionals

I have dozen of friends who transferred their career to public sectors in recent years. They now work as public employees on state jobs, — engineers, managers, administrators, and IT pros. They are telling me the same thing: State jobs are easy, light work load, flexible schedule, and most important, their jobs are protected by the union, — the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) is one of the strongest, toughest unions in the whole world.

A great benefit of state job is the Defined Benefit (DB) pension plan, that’s rare nowadays. You may have heard in news that many corporate pension plans have been converted to Defined Contribution (DC) plan, not good. However, even the DB pension in public sectors may not stay forever. CalPear, the California state’s DB pension plan may not be available for new state employees after 2010. However, those who have been enrolled into the pension plan will stay for life. This is guaranteed by California’s low. Unlike the corporate world, no one can move your cheese in public. Thus if you want to take the last chance to get into the rest of a few DB pension plans in human history, then go ahead to get a state job.

Working for the public sector, you don’t get big, fat bonus, but base salary is not bad, and you get about 5% annual increase guaranteed. Some of my friends were working for private consulting firms as programmers, DBA, system admin, analyst, etc. They used to take fat checks. But they are quite happy now as public workers with lower salary. So there must be something good in it. What I recently discovered is that, since there is not much to do often on the job, many public workers find that the work time is well used for their own business to get second income. A few friends of mine have used their IT skills to run internet businesses at work. That’s very sweet.

If you are a laid back, mid-aged career professional, tired of working hard, want to have more time with family, like to have a secured income, consider starting a business, then a state job is perfect for you.

The following are the links of state government job website for all 50 states: