Civil servants statute amendments to focus on mobility and flexibility

The amendments the government wants to make to the Statute of Personnel of the Public Administration of Macau (ETAPM) focus mostly on adding mobility and flexibility to the management of human resources from the government, the conclusion of the analysis of the bill by the Executive Council shows.

The bill, which has been now forwarded to the Legislative Assembly (AL), focuses on three different areas including the optimization of the civil servants’ mobility regime, the improvement of rules on professional retraining as well as service commission regime system.

The first area aims to merge the current four types of mobility methods into just two, including the “transfer” and “detachment,” which will simplify the system by which civil servants from a department or service can be allocated to a different department of service permanently or temporarily.

The new ETAPM also aims to facilitate the retraining of staff to be able to be relocated to a different service or different duties within the same service or department giving more flexibility to the leadership to manage staff and adjust staff number according to the needs instead of recruiting new staff members.

This strategy seems to be a new attempt to overcome the complex and time-consuming recruitment process, a problem which consecutive governments have acknowledged but have not been able to solve.

The last of the three areas of focus is mostly related to civil servants that work in Hengqin, improving the regulations on these matters taking into account the perceived need for more civil servants to be allocated to work in the Cooperation Zone in the future.