Training for government with a human face

Abstract

Training as we know it is basically the product of private industry. It has spread only very slowly, and then not very confidently, into the public sector. And within the public sector itself there is a huge disparity in the training effort. The Armed Services of the Crown have some of the best training in the country, but this is because, in peace‐time, training is their end‐product. Most of the nationalised industries have good training but this is because they brought the training tradition with them from the private sector. In other fields things are not so rosy. The National Health Service was an entirely new institution with training problems which are unique; they have not yet been tackled, let along solved. But it is in the Civil Service itself that the most serious training problems are to be seen and this is because training is inextricably linked with good government. We asked Duncan Smith, as one of the very few people qualified to undertake the task, to set the scene for us by presenting an overall view of training in the public service and setting out the main issues as he sees them.

Citation

Smith, D. (1977), "Training for government with a human face", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 9 No. 7, pp. 280-289. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb003616