Postal Delivery Officer
What the work is
Delivers mail, usually by motorised transport, over allocated delivery rounds.
Would you enjoy the work?
These are the main tasks in the official description. Mark how each one sounds to you.
- Sorts and organises mail for delivery
- Completes daily vehicle safety checks and loads mail onto a delivery vehicle
- Delivers mail to homes and businesses
- Obtains signatures from recipients for some delivered items
- Returns undelivered mail to a post office
- Maintains records of mail counts, deliveries and equipment
- Assists with checking wrongly addressed, missorted, undelivered and redirected mail, and processing freepost and underpaid mail
Try it
A simulation and a case study from this kind of work, set in a suburban postal and parcel round in a fictional regional town, by van, motorbike and on foot. They are fictional.
The kind of days you could have
Good days
- You know every street so well that the round flows and you finish ahead of time
- A customer waves from the window because the parcel they were waiting for has arrived
- A bright morning ride with a light load and a quiet street
Hard days
- A wet week with a full van, and every second letterbox is a sodden hunt for a gap
- A gate with a dog behind it and a parcel that needs a signature
- A busy season when the load triples and the day is never long enough
Written by Career Calling as a general guide. Real roles vary by employer and place.
Work a mission
Step into a simulated workplace in this field, with a brief from your manager.
Description and tasks: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Occupation Standard Classification for Australia, 2024, Version 1.0 (opens another site), occupation 712232, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. The skill guide above is our plain English summary.