Jamaican public sector workers being ‘upskilled’
As part of the Transformation of the
Public Sector, many public servants will be trained and ‘upskilled’.
“We have trained and certified 80 change managers and in this month, we will be doing another 60 change managers,” said Executive Director of the Transformation Implementation Unit (TIU), Maria Thompson Walters.
She explained that change is important,
and it requires management. “We don’t just evolve in an unstructured way, and
so we thought it was really important for the public sector to have this skill
(change management), rather than to keep importing it every time we’re going
through an exercise like this,” Ms. Thompson Walters said.
She explained that Change Management is
essentially [the act of] taking people through all of the various stages of
change.
“Your first instinct when someone opposes change may be that the person is a troublemaker. However, you don’t shut them down and just concentrate on those people who are with you, but you recognise that the persons may just be voicing what everyone else is thinking, and if we are able to help persons to understand what these changes bring, it makes the change process easier,” the Executive Director said.
In addition to Change Managers, the
Executive Director said that other persons will also be trained in systems and
software.
“A part of this programme deals with what
we call upskilling public officers, so we look at the skills and requirements
for the public sector for the future to ensure that public officers have an
opportunity to upskill themselves in this area,” she said.
“So far, we’ve done upskilling of persons from the technical offices in the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service, starting with a statistical and forecasting software called ‘Stata’. We are also looking to upskill persons in Human Resources (HR),” she added.
Ms. Thompson Walters said that an employee
engagement conference is being organised by the Jamaica Business Development
Corporation (JDBC) for later this month, to which the TIU has sponsored 15
persons.
