Chapter 12: The Future of Public Personnel

Chapter 12: The Future of Public Personnel

The era of building personnel systems on merit principles designed primarily to regulate and restrict public managers’ discretion seems now to be over. The reduction of bureaucratic structures and procedures, the decentralization of authority and accountability, the contracting-out or privatization of public services, and support management are dominant values driving the state-of-the-art thinking about how to design and run public personnel services of the future.

Although many of the human resources management tasks assigned to personnel or HR departments will not change, the ways in which they are carried out will be changed by new technologies and organizational arrangements that require enhanced as well as new skills. A growing number or government jobs will require highly trained and extensively educated professionals who must continuously upgrade their abilities to keep up with the intellectual and technical demands of their positions. In all likelihood, public employers increasingly will be forced to deal with the reality that sustained investments in workforce planning, training, and human resource development are needed an, in the long run, will be cost-effective. Human Resources development (HRD) encompasses at least three areas of human capital planning and development: (1) Training and Development, which involves identifying and helping to develop in a planned manner “the key competencies that enable individuals to perform current of future jobs.” Training and development concentrates on people in organizational roles or jobs, and it uses a variety of methods, including on- and off-site training, on-the-job training or OJT, supervisory coaching, and other ways of encouraging learning by individuals. (2) Organization Development, which concentrates on building effective and productive social-psychological relationships within and between work groups in organizations. (3) Career Development, which seeks to coordinate individual career planning and organizational career management processes to achieve an optimal match of individual and organizational needs.

Federal agencies are required by law to have processes for identifying their performance improvement needs, and they must have human resource development programs designed to meet those needs in efficient and effective ways. These processes include:
- Setting performance goals and determining the gaps, if any, between these goals and actual performance.
- Identifying the reasons for performance gaps and deciding if specific training and development initiatives should close or eliminate them.
- Regularly collecting and analyzing information about organizational training needs and using these data to guide decisions about investments in human resources development.
- Involving management and employees on all levels in planning and implementing HRD activities, and integrating training plans and programs with other human resource management functions.

In one very important sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same: Public personnel administration will continue to be an arena within which competing values and interests vigorously compete, and the outcomes of these clashes will have profoundly important consequences for American society.