“Public Service Selection Methods Too Restrictive”

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28896, 16 May 1959, Page 14

“Public Service Selection Methods Too Restrictive”

(Aeu. Zealand Pres* Association/

WELLINGTON. May 15. Selection procedures for public service administrators at all levels unduly restricted the wide and varied experience essential to the development of administrative talent. Mr N. C. Angus said today.

Mr Angus, superintendent of staff training in the Public Service Commission, told the convention of the Institute of Public Administration that many experts were diverted, or partly diverted, to administrative work through default of talent from other sources

“I accept without qualification that at lower levels the administration of technical men is properly in the hands of technical men. but at the critical point in any organisation where finance, policy and political considerations become predominant over purely technical considerations. there should be a pool of highly trained administrators from which to draw

“Too often there is not. There are only departmentally bred officers. * I think we must face the fact that our selection of administrators is pretty haphazard ” Analysis showed that from 1950-51 tc 1954-55 inclusive, 82 per cent, of all clerical appointments in the service were made from candidates in the department concerned. Thus the more experienced an officer, the less likely was he to win a position within another department.

There had emerged from the

important element in the acknowledged tension between expert, clerical officer and administrator, was that the education and training of administrators was, by and large, inferior to that of the experts they must control.