Face of a new public service

Debra Tuifao, 31, is the sort of person the public service wants to attract and keep.

A staff solicitor on the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry legal team, Tuifao's work day can range from offering opinions on whether the ministry should prosecute a biosecurity breach to eyeballing contracts and legislation.

"I really thrive on the urgency and excitement of it all," she says. "I like to be busy and I like to be challenged - it's what keeps me going."

Tuifao started in a part-time administrative role five years ago while doing her professionals at the University of Victoria's law school, and has worked her way through "big-picture" policy roles to the detail-focused legal team.

All the way through, she says, the best part of the job has been her colleagues. But as she is a solo mum of a 9-year-old, living with various members of her extended family, MAF's current attention to equal opportunity policy is important: "There's an understanding if you need time out."

Tuifao's also a member of a Pacific Islands staff network which aims to get more Polynesians out of clerical roles and up the ranks.

She says: "I'm a prime example that if you pick up relevant skills, you can use those skills in other areas. I had absolutely no agriculture background, but I picked up a lot of knowledge just being here."

But yes, the hours can be long: "I'm doing 45 or 46 hours a week. In policy, you can put in way more hours than that, long hours way into the night."

Mark Robinson, the State Services Commission's team leader, capability, is more your traditional public servant: after two years of law and accountancy at university, he joined a then offshoot of the Ministry of Education 23 years ago, aged 20. It was a temporary summer job, but he never left.

Robinson has seen a lot of change in that time - mid-1980s reforms shrank the service - but he says what has eventuated is a more flexible, less rules-bound, less paternalistic way of working.

And with career progress, he says, the emphasis is more on individual public servants to think about their own careers and work with employers to engineer the opportunities they think they need.

And there appear to be plenty of them: Robinson has spent time in other departments, several Ministers' offices, and was with the British civil service for three years on an exchange programme. He is now developing the SSC's strategy, capability and performance framework.

Robinson admits he has been offered a "couple of private sector jobs. But at the end of the day I really like what I do, the people I do it with, and I like the sense that even if it's indirect I'm contributing to public life in New Zealand. I've never been tempted to leave."