. On Tuesday, 3rd Sep, 2024, Mr. Sohail Ahmad, a former civil servant, delivered a comprehensive lecture on “Human Resource Management in Public Sector”. Human Resource in public sector is not being managed very well. The public sector in Pakistan is highly formalized, rule based, rigid, hierarchical, process oriented and not outcome or result oriented.

  1. Public sector is involved in personnel management rather than human resource management. He further elaborated personnel management, which includes performing functions of recruitment, training, placement, discipline etc.
  2. Public sector faces issues in HR management and development owing to absence of effective planning, lack of needs assessment, weak connection with recruitment and training institutions and no focus vis-a-vis in-service HR development. Consequently, public sector is having surplus manpower with irrelevant abilities, wasted resources on non-focused training and inefficient and weak governance. He told participants that effective performance evaluation is, indeed, a challenge for the public sector due to dearth of objectivity, over-rating issues, absence of job descriptions, desperation for promotions, political compulsions, no career planning and dependence on reputation.
  3. Public and private sectors are far apart in work culture. Both follow different HR practices. Goals and outcomes are much clear in the private sector, coupled with better compensation and motivation
  4. At the end, he suggested improving training programs for existing human resource in the public sector. He opined that there is dire need to transform current system of generalists’ recruitment and shift towards cultivating specialists through making service groups like general administration, financial economic services, social and human development service and diplomatic service etc.
  5. Human resource recruited in these respective streams should be given choice at the beginning of selection process. Once hired in a particular group, they should be developed as specialists throughout their career and, ultimately, must lead their respective organizations. Such mechanism will be more beneficial for the country’s long-term uplifts as it will develop specialized human resource with better service delivery through optimum HR management of public sector rather than relying on existing recruitment and evaluation system.