How to link organizational competences in public organizations?

Abstract

The fundamental role of human capital in economical and social success of individuals, organizations and nations is broadly recognized. In a context of globalization, dominated by innovation, accelerating technological progress and, subsequently, a constantly changing worldwide economy, the awareness of scientists and political decision-makers that competences and skills are an essential factor for both sustainable economic growth and social cohesion has contributed to this recognition. Naturally, investment in human capital is therefore a priority in public policy, mainly in the fields of education and training. However, this type of investment has not always brought the desired results. When this happens, the deficit in human capital tends to worsen due to the fact that social demands, in terms of knowledge, are incompatible with the waste of opportunity and public budget. This problem has been the object of concern and analysis by scientists and international organizations. Amongst these, OECD deserves special attention, for carrying out studies and identifying indicators capable of measuring, as objectively as possible, human capital and benefits from investing on it. In terms of training success, one of the most important criteria is the organizational context in which one works, including the consistency between individual and organizational performance. Consequently, training plans must be founded on an ex-ante analysis of human capital competences necessary to the organization and there must be an ex-post analysis, after the training, concerning the results obtained and the contributions of individual competences to the improvement of organizational performance. In the Portuguese Central Public Administration case, evaluation studies on the training cycle demonstrate that current training design and planning practices are casuistic and are not preceded by any needs assessment, which makes the ex-post evaluation impracticable. The purpose of this paper is to overcome this deficiency by providing public organizations a simple, clear and effective methodology to manage competences and training processes, in order to valorize human capital and to improve organizational performance. The developed methodology as been tested on a several number of public organizations in Portugal and consists on a linkage between the strategic goals of public organizations, according to the public policies, and the needed competences in order to achieve that goals.