Cum descriu oamenii experienta schimbarii locului de munca din mediul public in cel privat? O analiza interpretativ fenomenologica

The current research aims to present a detailed idiographic analysis regarding the experience of changing jobs from public service to private sector. The study was conducted on a sample consisting of five participants, ages between 24 and 46 years old. Each participant was interviewed based on semi-structured interviews and their transcripts were further analyzed using the interpretative phenomenological analysis. This specific method implied analyzing the experiential responses and their respective meanings line by line, retaining the first impressions followed by identifying the emergent topics from the experiential material, with focus on similarities and discrepancies within each case, as well as between all cases. Five themes emerged from the experiential material provided by the participants: the job characteristics in the public sector, the causes that lead to changing the workplace, the job characteristics in the private sector, barriers in adapting to the new work settings, changes regarding the relationship work – family life. Based on the “verbatim” content obtained, there could be outlined a certain “portrait” of the public sector as a product of a specific cultural, economic, social and even political environment, presented mainly as opposed to the private sector. The propensity to the “family” type work group, the institutional disorganization, the chaos represented by the bureaucracy, the lack of motivation and the routine are among the issues that matter, but lack” to the participants in the new workplace. We consider that this kind of approach provides new insights regarding the experience of changing the workplace from public to private sector, based on first-hand information from people who went trough the experience.