A college which belongs in the past

Feb 19, 2019 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The Bertram Collins College of the Public Service is an unnecessary institution. Why was such an institution established when there was already in place training programmes for public servants?
The establishment of a new college to train entry level, middle level and senior level public servants is suspect. From the inception, the idea of a college was a bad one.
The modern public service is not the military, which usually requires training colleges. Modern public services perform mainly regulatory functions and provide services to the public. Most of these functions require technical skills at the senior level and only basic skills at the junior level.
Persons leaving school are expected to have the basic skills to function at the entry-level in the public service. If they cannot, it means our school-leaving qualifications are worthless.
The idea of having cadets for the public service is steeped in military thinking. Those wishing to enter the public service are looking for employment. They do not wish to have to leave school and then to again enter a classroom to prepare them to do a clerk-level job.
These cadets who are fortunate to be selected for entry into the public service have to be fed, given uniforms, paid a stipend and taken on tours to various parts of the country, and all at taxpayers’ expense.
If a public servant in today’s modern environment has to be trained by a public service training college, it means that the public service is carrying a burden, which it ought not to be carrying. Why enter a college? What about on-the-job training?
For years, persons have been able to enter the public service at the entry level with nothing more than their CXC or GCE qualifications. They did not need to be sent to a college for one year to be trained in order to become clerks.
Similarly, at the upper echelons of the public service, where specialized and technical skills are required, the persons entering have to have experience and graduate and post-graduate education. If they have to be trained further at the employers’ expense to perform, then they too should not be on the job.
The public service is bottom heavy. The more batches of entry-level personnel who are registered in the college means that at the end of their training, jobs have to be found at the entry-level for these persons.
There is no need for a billion-dollar facility to train public servants. If certain training is required, this can be done through the Department of the Public Service, formerly the Public Service Ministry, which for years was providing adequate training for public servants.
The public service does not have a problem with staff training. It has a problem with performance, because there are many persons who are square pegs in round holes and who owe their employment to political connections, while better qualified and competent persons are not finding work.
Why therefore set up a college, paying fat salaries to its officers and costing the taxpayers a huge sum, which could have been out to better use.
The Bertram Collins College of the Public Service is unnecessary. It is a waste of time to be training persons to work at lower level jobs in the public service.
The College should not be advertising any positions for the public service. Thus should be done either by the Public Service Commission or by the respective Ministry. The College itself should have no role in the selection of persons who will eventually find their way into the public service.
Concerns were expressed that this college could be used to filter entrants into the public service and make such a process vulnerable to political manipulation.
The Bertram Collins College of the Public Service is an antiquated idea, named after a man who was far from being old-fashioned. He must be disappointed that his name is being used to foist an unnecessary bureaucratic albatross on the Guyanese people.
One of the first tasks of any new government should be to shut this institution down and return the training of public servants to the unit, which previously undertook such training using far less resources.

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A college which belongs in the past

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