Civil Sevants Compulsory Training
All civil servants have been instructed to undergo at least seven days of training annually to improve their competence, under a new Public Service Department requirement.
In a circular issued early this month, the PSD said civil servants would have to undergo training and re-training under the Public Services Human Resources Training Policy. The policy, which took effect on Jan 1, is in line with the Malaysian Remuneration System introduced by the Government in 2003.
The onus is now on ministries and government departments to set aside one per cent of their allocation for training.
Formerly, ministries and departments decided who to send for courses, but it was common that "many public servants did not go for a single course", PSD public relations officer Hasniah Rashid said when contacted.
Government offices will now be compelled to see to the training needs of all staff, record details of their participation and evaluate the effectiveness of the courses.
The policy is to ensure that every civil servant has the appropriate attitude, skills and knowledge, through planned human resources programmes based on competency development and life-long learning, the circular says.
Secretaries-general and department heads will have to ensure that their staff undergo training courses at five levels: pre-placement, basic, mid-level, continuation and transitional. They will also sit on the national Public Sector Training Council, which will be headed by PSD director-general Datuk Ismail Adam. It will study and approve proposals to improve the policy from time to time.
"The council will also assess the needs of public training institutes and monitor the quality of their programmes. It will set guidelines for co-operation and linkages with foreign training institutes and international bodies on policy implementation," the PSD said.
The panels to be set up in each ministry and department will be in charge of identifying and planning training for the officers and monitor its implementation.
The PSD will continue to organise pre-service training, short courses such as the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard University and Oxford University, local or overseas courses longer than three months, and courses sponsored by foreign countries or international bodies.
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Is training or the lack of it the main reason of systemic administrative weakness related to the lack of competency of civil servants? Oh, my God, please leave me alone.
The fundamental doctrines of Competency comprises the profound trinity: KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ATTITUTE.
7 days of training per annum will never provide an individual the food to develop competency at all; neither 14 days or 30 days per annum.
To achieve competency of knowledge, each individual have to go through a journey of continuous learning of each knowledge area - technical, operational, analytical psychological, physiological and philosophical, not forgeting spiritual.
As regard to skill, no matter how much time you spent on training, as long as you did not practice it daily, and "you don't know what you don't know", your skills will remain what you had been. Apart from this, skill training may be carried out by outdated, outmoded and pusillanimous trainers and the participants may just be there for the sake of compliance. Look at the teachers in schools and uiniversities, and you can find the answer to this point. In an environment of mediocrity, only the mediocres are engaged to impart and transfer their knowledge and skills to another mediocre. Example, look at the universities where the lecturers are teaching business management subjects and they had been teaching the subject since they graduated from university; they had never work for any corporations in their life-time; maybe a year or two, but it won't suffice. I have spent more than 8 years in university life and my lecturers gave case studies of organizations such as Coca-Cola, IBM, GE, etc, all of which, they had never had any experience working within those organizations. All they know and what information they had were culled from text books and from writings by journalist, not from the CEO or senior executives themselves.
In Elite Ivy league universities, students and researchers are sent to selective organizations to get first hand experience, to conduct research on a typical subject matter before they can complete a thesis or to graduate. Take Michael Porter as an example, where he did the research on strategic management pertaining to competition and competitive advantage and he has to spent years in his research on various conglomerates and institutions to complete his thesis.
Attitude? OH, My God! It cannot be taught. You cannot learnt. It is upbringing and culturalistics and environmentalistic. Who say cannot learn? Oh, sorry, you can learnt only with one condition, i.e., you must have had suffered fatally in an incident or over recentbusiness collapse, or had just recovered from a cronic disease; yes, you will surely learn and your attitude will improve radically. You can see, those who have lost their empire during the economic crisis few years back, (absolutely must be their own -they are the real owners, not proxies), then these people had learn a good lesson, and will be a changed person - they had acquired wisdom, the Profound Knowledge of Business Management.
But if the empire was presumably theirs but they had not actually paid to acquire it - money if not from their own pocket, not from their own blood and sweat and tears, then the failure they had been thru'; oh, it would not be any lesson at all; they will repeat it again, soon, in the not too distant future. The case of Bumiputra Bank is a clear example - it had to be bankrupted twice. Perwaja Steel is another example; it had to be rescued three times [Period].
So, 7 days training to improve competency? Let me tell you - you won't get competency but you will get some knowledge; sorry, not knowledge, just mere information of knowledge; so that you can talk about it and preach about it to others, without pragmatism and objectivism, and without profound knowledge.
Good Luck to PSD and the Civil Servants. Enjoy the training provided; it is free, absolutely free! Take it as a 7 days holiday away from work and stress, bring your family along during the training; and pay the trainers well, please.!!!!!!!
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