Governor Walker claims that doing away with qualifying exams for State of Wisconsin civil service jobs will speed up hiring. Maybe that is true, although I believe the major reason State positions are hard to fill right now is mostly because Walker and the Republican legislature have significantly cut take-home pay for State jobs, while making them much less secure by essentially doing away with public employee unions. Whether his real intent is to make it even easier to make patronage hires (it was already pretty easy under previous administrations), is a topic for another day.
My first experience with State civil service exams was in 1978. I had recently returned from 3-plus years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Central America, and was looking for a job that would allow me to go back to college. I remember taking a number of different exams, and going to a bunch of interviews. I’d always been a good test-taker, and if I scored in the top five on an exam they were required to interview me for job openings. I remember thinking it was a bit silly to have a written exam for blue-collar jobs that really required very limited reading and writing skills. But it worked to my advantage, so I wasn’t complaining. Also, as anybody who has hired someone for a manual-labor job and then found out that the person was incapable of following written instructions, will tell you, literacy skills should not be under-valued!
I was eventually hired to work third shift as a janitor at the University of Wisconsin (UW) Memorial Union, and a couple of months later I switched to a second shift Building Maintenance Helper (If I could have the job of inventing official titles for State positions, I’d come out of retirement!) job at the UW Hospital and Clinics. The second-shift job allowed me to go back to college at UW Madison, taking math and computer science classes.
I didn’t finish a Masters degree, but acquired enough computer programming skills to get hired. My first programming job was in the private sector and my second in the public sector but out-of-state. Then my life took a detour for several years. I managed a dairy farm after my Dad passed away.
So here is where my story resembles that of the real or made-up one told by Governor Walker. I refer to the supposed short-order cook who was interviewed for a State regulator job due to a high score on a State civil service exam. Unlike the Governor, I don’t see any problem at all with this. In Madison, this short-order cook was probably working on an advanced degree in business or accounting, and would have made a perfectly good regulator, despite having no experience specific to the position!
In my case I was a dairy farm manager who scored high on the State exam for computer professionals (the title was Management Information Specialist). I went to several interviews (again, they had to interview me because I had one of the top five scores) before being hired by a small State agency.
This was the beginning of a 15-year career as a State information technology (IT) professional, followed by 13 years as an instructor in the Information Technology Department at Madison Area Technical College (MATC).
Would I have gotten hired to an entry-level job under a resumé-only system, centralized in the State Department of Administration (DOA)? Given that at the time I was being interviewed for that first IT job, all of the medium to large agencies I interviewed with passed on me, I seriously doubt it.
I offer my experience as food for thought. The last thing our State civil service system needs is more patronage hires, and the exams clearly were one way to counter that. “Were” is the key word here!
