Among the topics of greatest political and academic debate in Latin American countries is that of the alleged lack of talent in the public sector of their countries, a topic that becomes relevant as a consequence of the current international financial economic crisis, where governments are seeking to optimizing public management, it is under such circumstances that the question arises: is there a lack of talent in the public sector? To answer this question, I am going to take the Peruvian public sector as a model.
One of the great myths in the general public is that there is a lack of talent in the country's public sector. And there is no such lack, what happens is that for a long time various governments have lacked a career path for the public sector, and given such lack the main senior management positions of public bodies have fallen to positions of trust, where the fundamental principles of the human resource management approach have not been fulfilled, such as the personnel planning process, where it is a matter of anticipating what the human resources will be necessary in quantity and quality to achieve the organizational objectives.
This leads to the application of recruitment techniques, selection and evaluation of personnel, as well as the adequate use of fundamental tools in the administration of human resources such as Job Analysis, Performance Evaluation Systems, Training Policies, Motivation, Remuneration, Benefits. Social, Development in the organization, among others. As well as respect for labor legislation.
In this sense, there are talents in the public sector, made up of well-qualified academic workers, with experience and identified with their organization, but who are frustrated by not being able to move up, because senior management positions are generally filled with external personnel., trusted by the governments on duty and not by qualified technicians who were forged in public entities from a very young age and who generally trained on their own, which has led to another known problem: the flight of talents.
Based on the question, is there a lack of talent in the public sector?
My answer is that there is no such lack, at least in the magnitude that is believed and it will not be a great difficulty for the government to locate the talents, as long as a real structural change in the management of the administration of the Human resources in the public sector, based on technical foundations, without political interference and in which public workers participate, because otherwise there is a risk of finding a natural resistance to change, as the workers feel that it is a new imposition and because the valuable contribution of those who really know the problems of their organizations would also be lost.
In this way, when making a structural change in the management of human resources administration in the serious and technical public sector, workers will be identified with the change, will support it and will be able to identify the talents that exist, those who They need to be the case and meet the needs of organizations, achieve their goals, and meet the expectations that citizens have for the services that public sector organizations provide.
