Stable for the right personality but wouldn't recommend overall
Pros
It’s a federal job. After a year or whenever probation ends, you have job security as long as your job performance is satisfactory. This is a job where you help people get retirement money, medicare, disability, and other benefits/protection. Knowing that the purpose of your job is to help people can and should be really rewarding for many people. As of now, Work From Home looks likely to stay permanent, but there is potential to shift to a hybrid schedule. This has been amazing for work-life balance! No commute but you are kind of chained to your desk because of all the cords and extra accessories you have to use. With the introduction of Microsoft Teams, virtual interviewing, original document scanners, there is the potential for portable work to increase which is great for continued work from home. Benefits: great health care, FSA, TSP 5% matching, perks like discounts on fitness, retirement seminars, financial classes, WAPO subscription, Espyr, paid parental leave. federal holidays, PTO, Follow FedSmith, GovExec, Federal News Network for regular fed related news, and probably one of the more important ones to me, you are not allowed to do work past 5:00 or 6:00 pm. Meaning your boss can’t call you at 8:00 pm to work on some project because your computers won’t log on for security purposes. Like most places, you get good, okay, and bad co-workers. I had a superb mentor which made my learning and day-to-day much better, especially having started during the pandemic. Having a good mentor also helped me get up to speed on working with claimants.
Cons
The technology is outrageously antiquated for 2021 even by government standards. SSA has been so starved from resources. They have a modernization task force which described the modernization process as “rebuilding the plane while we are still flying it” The technology you will use was developed in the 70’s and 80’s and has been updated at a snails pace. It is jarring to go from messaging your team mates with Microsoft Teams, to having to use abbreviations on a claimant’s application because the program doesn’t give you enough room to write a full remark. There are too many opportunities for human error when taking a claim. For all of these programs and programs written to help the programs, there are too many to remember. I have saved so many in my favorites or on my OneNote but the amount of policy and technical training you must remember is overwhelming and you will not remember all of it. You must learn how to find the information you need. That is the only way to learn how to do this job correctly. For me that meant a combination of organized favorites links, saving all of the policy links from each lesson on my OneNote lesson pages, and creating Microsoft Word Docs for different types of claims with different tips, reminders, questions, links, and anything else I had found useful. This is all part of the antiquated coding system. You need all of these reminders because human error is very common and it doesn't have to be with an automated system. Not only would there be less human error with a modern system, there would be way faster processing times, and the ability to help more people per day. The office I worked in was extremely impacted because we were located in a dense area, other less populated areas probably don’t have as many cases. But in my old office at least (Greater Los Angeles/Orange County Area), the agency needs to hire probably 5-10 more people, ( at least 3 for Claims Specialists) because of how impacted offices are and because of retirements. However again this is the government and a political agency- getting more workers has to get approved at the top. Government bureaucracy and red tape, but this should be expected if you decide to work for the government. No disability or extended sick leave for long term illnesses. It is an inherently political agency and this is a federal agency, meaning there are regular fights about funding or starving SSA. I’ll let you guess which party is which. You have potential for furloughs from government shutdowns. Who is president actually matters for you in this job. There were a number of executive orders that were quite harmful to federal employees in the previous administration, all of those have been reversed now, but should give you an idea of how much a president can actually matter in a federal job. SSA has had their union rights fully restored under the current administration for example. Journeyperson CS, unless you plan to go into management, is about the top of the range. GS-11, maybe 12 is about the highest salary you can go to. This is a technical and customer service job. You are dealing with the public, the majority of the calls you make are fine, some friendlier than others, but fine, but you will get some rude people, arrogant people, grifters, people who hate the government, (again these are much less likely, but we do get them). Training lasts anywhere from 6-8 months, depending on how familiar you are with the job. (Some people get hired off the street, others were customer service reps who moved up to become Claims Specialists) Know that if you are coming off the street, there is a steep learning curve. That training for 6-8 months means if you are working from home and not training in the office, not only are your closest companions cartoon figures, or pop culture figures they copied from the internet, it also means your learning is not as rich in my opinion, because you are not learning or listening to all the other cases that your colleagues work on, you are isolated, which, for some may be good, but was difficult for me. I would have rather learned/trained with others. The pandemic affected my training and hopefully they will develop better training policy once the pandemic is over.
