A course on interpersonal skills in the employment service agency

Abstract

The public service employs a huge and growing number of people but it has little or no tradition of training. In days gone by training had an extremely low priority: a high level of performance was sought by recruiting able people and developing their experience by moving them about from job to job and, often, department to department. Now there is a movement to put training in the public service on a sounder footing, though generally this has not got very far beyond the stage of trying to discover what training is appropriate to this type of work. While this state of affairs exists in the public service, training in industry and commerce has been developed in Britain to a very high level. A reasonable question to ask is: what can the public service learn from the private sector in the matter of training? Or better still: what can the public service borrow from the private sector that is already well‐developed and proven? In this article the manager of training modules, management training unit, Employment Service Agency explains how interactive skills training has been adapted for use in one branch of the public service.