Training for civil servants raises questions

The process of selection, hiring and training of Macau civil servants was one of the topics that raised many concerns by several lawmakers yesterday during the second day of questions and answers over the policy address for administration and justice, with the presence of Secretary Sonia Chan and her team at the Legislative Assembly (AL).

Lawmaker Lei Chan U requested that Chan explain how she plans to put into practice the added training for civil servants announced by the Chief Executive (CE).
Lei also wanted to know how the secretary expects to evaluate the results of such training.

According to the lawmaker, who cited a survey to which almost 1,300 civil servants answered back in 2015, “17 percent of the surveyed responded that [the training sessions] are not useful and over 70 percent said that they are totally useless.” Lei claimed that there is an urgency to review the mechanism as it seems to be very far from the idea expressed by the CE of creating an academy for civil servants.

Replying to the lawmaker was the director of the Public Administration and Civil Service Bureau (SAFP), Eddie Kou, who noted “we have already studied this situation in order to solve it. We have verified that, regarding training courses, there is some margin for improvement in terms of conception and capacity.”

“We concluded that there are 12 factors we should focus on to raise the efficiency of the training,” he added. “We want that in the future these training sessions are done accordingly to the real needs of the workers.”

Kou also noted that it is the intention of the SAFP to review the performance evaluation method in a way that “workers with better classification get chances to access several [better] career paths.”

Adding to Kou’s reply was Chan, who stressed that the number of civil servants was problematic for Chui’s academy.

“We have about 34,000 civil servants; in the security field alone we have 11,000 and these ones have their own [training] institute. Also, there are 2,000 that are included at IPM [Macau Polytechnic Institute] and UM [University of Macau], which are not [required] to participate in this training. If we remove those, the other [about] 20,000 are participating in the session promoted by SAFP. We have to take this in note on a creation of an academy of this size.”