Government agencies to share resources
HUNDREDS of government workers will, as of early next year, start to benefit from a public-sector staff interchange programme aimed at facilitating the sharing of resources and fostering better relationships among government offices.
Workers will be sent on secondments or attachments to other government agencies or may be assigned to mentoring or shadowing programmes. There will also be joint training programmes across the agencies.
The initiative, which is the brainchild of the trade union movement, is still in its early stages but has already won approval from the monitoring committee of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). The document outlining the concept is currently being circulated within public agencies to sensitise workers.
The programme will specifically target areas such as customer service, corporate planning & budgeting, industrial relations, policy formation and management.
Wayne Jones, president of the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA) and vice-president of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions (JCTU), provided details of the plan on Tuesday at a seminar convened to discuss the “tenets/intricacies” of the MoU at the Management Institute of National Development (MIND) in Kingston.
“We expect it will benefit all the organisations. The sender organisation will benefit by filling skills gaps,” Jones said.
“Some agencies are stronger than others in some areas, so by interchanging we can share skills. We’re all for gaining new skills, and it gives the opportunity to share skills and to build networks”, he told the Observer after the seminar.
“It was really the trade unions that came up with the idea for this cross-training, and the government has bought into it,” he continued.
Jones said the exchange programme would be open to all permanent employees within government ministries and their various departments and agencies. He said individuals would not be attached to another agency for more than two years, and would “lose none of their benefits”.
The civil service association head was keynote speaker at MIND’s Hope campus, where the level 4 participants of the certificate course in administrative management (CAM) hosted the seminar as part of their final examination.
CAM coordinator at MIND, Natasha Gordon, said the staff took the decision to use the hosting of a function rather than theory-based testing as the final exam for the candidates because it allowed them to put into practice what they had been learning over the five-week duration of the course.
Gordon said the programme had been enjoying steady success, with gradual increases in the enrolment numbers over the last three years. Her goal now, however, is to “approach the Services Commission to get them to put increments on their [the graduates’] salaries once they complete the course”.
This year’s cohort, totalling 14 women, came from the public sector and most of them were sponsored by their organisations.