Enhancing Public Personnel Competence Through Training: The Role Of Public Service Institute Of Nigeria (PSIN) (Published)
Improving the competence level of public personnel is very imperative for efficient service delivery. Governments world over has as its key objective the rendering of prompt and efficient services to its citizens and at the same time be as accountable and transparent as possible while carrying out these responsibilities. For a government to fulfil its objective to its citizens it must ensure that its workforce is well and able to live up to the demands of fulfilling these objectives. This cannot be achieved without a competent, efficient, effective and result-oriented public service. The public service is constantly evolving with increasing service delivery demands from the citizens. The importance of equipping public servants with the right training to satisfy the citizens’ demands can only be met when the public servants have the required competence to meet these challenges. This paper relied on documented secondary data as its source of data collection and adopted the qualitative review analysis as its methodology. The paper also used the Expertise Theory as the framework for explaining how public personnel competence can be enhanced through training and human resource capacity building. Constant training and human capacity building development have been proved to be the best, widely accepted and most efficient solution to the problem of enhancing competence in the Nigerian public service. This is inview of the importance of constant training and human resource capacity building as expressed by scholars and the Nigerian government in various committee reports, recommendations, and White papers on public service reforms. The focus of this paper is to examine the role of Public Service Institute of Nigeria in enhancing public personnel competence in the public service. The findings show poor funding and lack of political will on the part of the government to implement several reform recommendations on public personnel training. The paper therefore, recommends increased funding of the Institute and enhanced political commitment to address the training needs in the public service.
Keywords: Public Service, Training, personnel competence