Human Resources Management in a Changing World: Reassessing Public Human Resources Management Education

Abstract

Public administration scholars have gone to great lengths to assess both the extent of personnel reform efforts across the public sector and their impact on employee attitudes toward public sector employment. However, to the degree that these reforms represent the future of public sector human resources management (HRM), the field has yet to fully address how the education of future public servants and human resources professionals should be adjusted to reflect this transformation. This article seeks to address this issue by reevaluating those subject areas and competencies that have long been considered the core of public sector HRM education, proposing what new competencies should be introduced into the core in light of the contemporary reform environment and providing a preliminary assessment of the extent to which contemporary academic and practitioner-based educational programs reflect the current landscape of public sector HRM.