PARI Report Interviews with HRD Units - PSETA

REPORT TO PSETA (‘REPORT 2’): Summary of findings from interviews with selected departments on how HRD interventions are being determined by departments and their use of PSETA’s Sector Skills Plans to shape HRD priorities 14 October 2015 -‐ FINAL Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) Submitted to: the Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority (PSETA)

Report to PSETA: summary of interviews with selected departments on factors shaping 2 their training priorities and the use of PSETA’s SSP to inform training plans Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) October 2015, FINAL

Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 3

Sources .................................................................................................................................................. 3

Background: competencies prioritised by PSETA for particular support ............................................... 4

Findings .................................................................................................................................................. 5

Structure of HRD function provincially .............................................................................................. 5

Identification of training priorities by departments and the use of PSETA’s SSP to inform this ....... 7

The WSP process ............................................................................................................................... 9

Summary and recommendations .......................................................................................................... 9

References ........................................................................................................................................... 12


Introduction The following report summarises findings from interviews with a small purposive sample of provincial and national departments: the interviews aimed to develop a better understanding what shapes departments’ skills planning, obtaining their opinions on the priority skills areas identified by PSETA in the last few SSPs and the extent to which these departments use PSETA’s Sector Skills Plan (SSP) to inform their Human Resource Development (HRD) plans. Information was also gained on departments’ views and use of the Workplace Skills Plan (WSP) process. The interviews undertaken for this report are intended to support the Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority’s (PSETA) strategic planning and its engagement with its constituent employer departments. The interviews also informed the development of PSETA’s latest SSP (submitted to the Department of Higher Education and Training in August this year).

Sources Interviews for this report were undertaken between June and August of this year and where conducted by a researcher from the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI), accompanied by at least one researcher from PSETA. PSETA staff from the skills planning and research unit took part in the interviews in order to build their research skills. The meetings were scheduled by PSETA. Interviews were undertaken with: • The Senior Manager for HRD, Provincial Treasury, Limpopo Province. • The Deputy Director for People Empowerment, Office of the Premier, Western Cape Province. Interviews with the Gauteng Premier’s Office, the Gauteng Department of Transport and the Eastern Cape Premier’s office were also planned, but firm dates for these interviews have not been scheduled. Departments were purposively sampled from the government departments who report to PSETA (whether they are ‘dual-‐reporting’ or report only to PSETA). The departments were chosen because PSETA has a sense that these departments are in fact using the PSETA SSP to inform their training and / or undertaking training of the kind that support PSETA’s wider arguments for building capacity in the public service.1 These departments were considered better placed to provide useful insight for PSETA to further appropriately shape its SSP and skills development initiatives. Further, it was posited that should those departments that are considered better performing (in terms of HRD) still not be using the SSP to inform their own training, this will provide PSETA with an indication of the need for advocacy and dissemination work, and for more detailed stakeholder engagement to produce sector skills planning that resonates with its ‘client’ departments.

1 Developed based on PSETA’s interaction with the departments over the last few years, their input on the SSP and so forth.


In addition, PARI has also drawn on interviews undertaken by PARI in 2013 and 2014, namely: • Interviews undertaken as part of a case study of HRD in the public service for PSETA (PSETA,

2014b). • Interviews undertaken in preparation for the PSETA SSP in 2013 (2013b): i.e. with HRD staff in

the Department of Trade and Industry, Department of Home Affairs and National Treasury, May 2013.

Background: competencies prioritised by PSETA for particular support PSETA’s latest SSP (PSETA, 2015) outlines PSETA’s plans for supporting skills development in the public service over the medium term. The identified priority skills were presented to the sector in March this year, at PSETA’s national colloquium on skills development for the public service. PSETA’s approach for identifying its priority skills is summarised in the following figure: PSETA will prioritise development of the following state capabilities (interventions to support any priorities identified in the NDP Chapter 13 will also be considered): 1. Professional and technical competencies, through a focus on support for the Strategic

Infrastructure Projects; 2. Development of more operationally inclined and skilled management; 3. Improve technical competencies in Supply Chain Management (SCM), including contract

management; 4. Improve competencies in HRD and Human Resource Management (HRM), including a focus on

improving the public service’s capacity to offer training through e-‐learning and to improve its ability to support work integrated learning.

Framework)

Consideration of PSETA’s mandate and focus on transversal skills ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Identify state capabilities needed to implement the National Development Plan

!

! ! ! !

!

Iden%fy(par%cularly(cri%cal(skills(emerging(from(policy(developments(and(major(state(projects(

Prioritise skills that are most needed to improve organisational performance to act as a

“foundation” for the competencies above!

Understand the nature of the South African state

Understand the drivers of organisational performance in the post-apartheid period - Which competencies have been linked to successful turnarounds? Which competencies

are key to organisational development?(

Use quantitative data where available, qualitative sector studies and studies which analyse the institutional challenges to improved

service delivery and accountability!


Broadly, these priorities will be supported through the following mechanisms: 1. Work with relevant central government ‘champions’ of the competencies (the Office of the Chief

Procurement Officer (OCPO) in the case of procurement, the Department of Public Service and Administration (DPSA) in the case of HRD etc.) to ensure alignment of training across the public service and to more precisely identify the mechanisms through which improved competencies can best be supported;

2. Support training providers (especially public providers) to develop more relevant and improved quality curriculum to address ‘demand-‐supply’ mismatches;

3. Use the discretionary grants as a mechanism to encourage departments to pool resources, align their training approaches and support the development of the priority skills outlined above;

4. Facilitate knowledge sharing between departments, academies and other stakeholders; 5. Market the public service as a career of choice to support the recruitment of top graduates and

artisans into the public service. PSETA will use discretionary grants to support proposals for skills development that provide priority skills, that can show some degree of training at scale, at reasonable per capita costs, and which are in line with national approaches to skills development set by the national “champions” of these state capabilities. Departments will be supported to collaborate with other departments to maximize impact and efficiencies. Departments will also be encouraged to co-‐fund these programmes to improve the chances of senior level departmental support for the programmes. Through the strategic allocation of its discretionary grants and working with departments to build these proposals, PSETA thus aims to support a “change management” process in the skills development sector – moving departments toward a more strategic approach to training.

Findings

Structure of HRD function provincially Respondents were asked to provide information on the structure of HRD in their provinces to provide the researchers with background context for understanding the institutional arrangements shaping skills planning and HRD. In most provinces in South Africa HRD is managed fairly autonomously by departments, with the Office of the Premier playing some role in collecting statistics from all departments on internships, bursaries and so forth. This is the model followed by the Limpopo Province. In Gauteng, the Office of the Premier plays a more active role in supporting the development competencies they have identified as of priority. The Western Cape has centralised its HRD to a far greater extent than the other provinces. Since 2010, HRD in the Western Cape Province has been coordinated through the Corporate Service Centre (CSC). The Centre handles HRD for all departments except health and education. Each department has a Corporate Relationship Unit that interfaces with the Premier’s CSC, and each


department has a training committee and a Skills Development Facilitator. Every year, departments send in their list of training needs to the CSC – these are then aggregated by the CSC, and checked against the CSC’s sense of what kinds of training and qualifications are most needed in the Province. This data is also sent to the Province’s training academy (named Kromme Rhee), which uses the information to shape its skills development planning. The organisational design unit also sits in the CSC – this is the unit responsible for shaping the organisational structures of departments (in consultation with departments) and signing off on applications for new posts. Our respondent from the Western Cape Office of the Premier felt that the centralised model has improved the Province’s ability to identify training needs more strategically, though there is some concern amongst a few departments that the HRD unit is now quite removed from a textured sense of the various departments’ capacity building needs. Limpopo is a somewhat contrasting story. We illustrate this with reference to a particular training programme in the Province: the Limpopo Treasury has a well-‐developed internship programme for young graduates (which we describe in the box below). The Senior Manager for HRD in the Treasury hoped to use the programme as a way to feed these graduates (who go through a formal, two year internship) into line-‐function departments in the Province in order to build professional capacity in financial management in the provincial administration. While some of the graduates have been absorbed into municipalities in the Province, very few (in fact the respondent said, “almost zero”) have been taken on by provincial departments. There appears to be little coordination in the province around HRD. There thus may well be value in a more centralised provincial HRD model. This model potentially provides some opportunity for greater coordination of training programmes between the province and PSETA. Limpopo Treasury’s internship programme The Limpopo Treasury drew from the National Treasury’s model in building its internship programme, which it has named the ‘Professional Development Programme’. Internships last two years and involve interns obtaining work experience in the department, supplemented by some classroom-‐based training. All interns receive training manuals and are expected to complete certain learning assignments. Interns spend some time in each of the units in the Treasury – SCM, finance and so forth – in order to expose them to a variety of financial management functions. As of last year, each intern is assigned to a staff member who is to have primary responsibility for their on-‐the-‐job training. Interns are also provided with support to build their curriculum vitaes to assist them in finding employment on completion of their internship. At the end of the internship, the interns are issued with a certificate outlining the kind of work exposure and training they have received. At the moment the Senior Manager for HRD is defending the need for the two-‐year internship programme – a more senior manager wants to cut the programme to one year. The HRD manager is adamant that two years is the minimum experience that young graduates require to enable them find work elsewhere, and for interns to have sufficient time to learn about the work of the various functions across the department. As mentioned, few interns are absorbed into other departments in the Province. While the HRD manager interviewed noted that it would not be appropriate for the majority of interns to be absorbed every year (given that only a few posts would be available for new recruits), a good deal more could be done by his own


department and others in the Province to retain the most talented graduates. In Provincial Treasury, for example, they struggle to recruit and retain economists. They have recently lost the opportunity to employ two smart young economists because the job descriptions for the vacant posts demanded more years of experience than these economists had. Our respondent felt that HR needed to be more proactive and flexible in ensuring the department finds and retains the skills it needs (and indeed there is some flexibility displayed by the Department when it comes to taking on personnel politically deployed to the department). Despite the limited success of the internship programme in feeding graduates trained by the Treasury into line function departments, it nonetheless appears to offer a model for the public service in acting as a training space for young unemployed graduates in South Africa (as per the National Integrated HRD Strategy’s recommendations).

Identification of training priorities by departments and the use of PSETA’s SSP to inform this The HRD department in Limpopo Treasury appears to be headed by an experienced HR practitioner – it is under his leadership that the department has developed its flagship internship programme. The HRD Senior Manager has some room to monitor officials’ requests for training against what he feels would support organisational capacity building. That said, the HRD Senior Manager’s seemingly sound ideas on organisational capacity building do not appear to have translated into an organisation wide commitment to a more strategic approach to training; HRD planning still appears to be largely lead by individual demand more than organisational capacity requirements. Our respondent also noted that there is a lack of coordination between HRD planning and the performance management system. The Senior Manager also notes that there is little attention given to succession planning and mentorship of staff already in the department. The Western Cape model has been outlined above. Whilst our respondents felt that the Province no longer simply generates a ‘wishlist’ of training demands (departments are now pushed to submit only five priority training areas each per year), she noted that the HRD unit in the CSC is as yet too small to undertake in-‐depth analysis and verification of departments’ capacity building needs. The CSC still very much relies on the information provided to them by departments, rather than engaging in a more iterative dialogue. PSETA’s SSP does not appear to have actively shaped the identification of departments’ priority skills focus in the departments interviewed by PARI this year and last year. The HRD Senior Manager in the Limpopo Treasury clearly engages with PSETA’s SSP in some detail. Previous years’ SSPs have influenced his decision to move to longer term accredited programmes over shorter courses for example, and he is in full support of the focus suggested by PSETA (in terms of training approaches proposed and the competencies identified for priority support). As yet, however, these competencies have not been prioritised for capacity building over others in the department.


The manager interviewed in the Western Cape Premier’s Office had not seen last year’s SSP, and it does not appear to have been circulated to all managers in the HRD unit. When PSETA’s focus on HRD, SCM and operational management was communicated to her during the interview (June 2015) she was in full agreement with this focus. SCM has recently become a priority area of focus in the Western Cape Province. The aim is to increase the amount of training provided on SCM and to professionalise the occupations associated with SCM. This attention on SCM has been driven in part by the Province’s own analyses about the centrality of the SCM function for service delivery, but also by a push from the OCPO in the National Treasury. The OCPO has held meetings with the Office of the Premier as well as with a number of Chief Financial Officers in the Province. With regards to improving competencies in operations management and other skills needed to support operationally focused managers, our Western Cape respondent noted that they too have seen this as an area in need of particular support – at present they are focusing on developing the skills of middle management in particular and have developed courses specifically for this group of personnel. They feel that the curriculum content of their courses for middle managers still needs to be improved (Kromme Rhee has in-‐house curriculum development teams, though it also works with other higher education institutions in delivering these courses, such as the University of Stellenbosch’s School for Public Leadership). Finally, on developing capacity in HRM and HRD: despite strong agreement from respondents interviewed regarding the for the need for capacity building in a range of functions in HR, this set of competencies appears to be the least prioritised by departments, of the three main areas identified by PSETA for focused support (SCM, HRM and HRD and operationally competent management). None of our respondents could mention specific plans developed, or training programmes identified, in support of developing HRD capacity. There may be a number of reasons for this gap – first, it may be related to the low status accorded to HR in the public service (if line managers do not consider HR and people management as important, as say, skills in project management or budgeting, they may be less likely to seek training in HR – and as we have seen – training priorities are still very much driven by aggregating individual demand); second it may be related to supply side factors (the nature and availability of HR courses for the public service); and third, it may relate to the lack of a strong champion for HRD in the central national government (in contrast, for example, to the increased prioritisation of SCM as a result of the OCPO’s advocacy work). On developing capacity to deliver training through e-‐learning, the Limpopo Treasury is at the very beginning of exploring this. They have recently established a internal departmental IT platform to share information and training material. As yet the department does not have capacity to offer training via e-‐learning on site. Through the infrastructure at Kromme Rhee, the Western Cape is at a more advanced stage in this regard.


The WSP process In the last three SSPs submitted to DHET, PSETA has outlined some of the problems with the WSP process and data (PSETA, 2013; 2014a; 2015). These findings were based on PARI’s interviews with departments in preparation for the SSP in 2013 and 2014, and based on feedback in PSETA stakeholder engagements in Pretoria in preparation for the SSPs. The Western Cape Premiers Office provided further input on the WSPs. Workplace Skills Plans (WSP) submitted by public service departments and agencies are currently not a reliable source for PSETA in estimating where scarce and critical skills in the public service lie. Furthermore, departments interviewed are not using them as tools within their organisation to assess or plan for their own training needs. The issues can be summarised as follows:

• In many, though not in all cases, the quality of data capture by departments is poor. Further, data is not accurate because some departments do not receive the data they need from the various work / business units in their department.

• The WSP template requires departments to report on their training in terms of the Organising Framework for Occupations (OFO) codes. The departments we spoke to do not use these codes in their own skills planning data systems, nor are these codes used in Persal. The Office of the Premier in the Western Cape, for example, analyses past training and plans for future training using rank bands and salary bands.

• Furthermore, the report template that is generated by the WSP system is in Microsoft Word format – a number of departments noted that an Excel formatted report would be more useful, allowing officials to use the reports to more easily analyse the training data.

• The submission deadline (set by Department of Higher Education and Training) for WSPs has changed – it is no longer in line with departments’ performance management cycle, creating further frustration with the WSP process.

• Additionally, it is PARI’s view that the amount of data the WSP are intended to capture is onerous in relation to the use of the data.

In summary, departments do not see the gains from submitting WSP data. Departments view the submission of this data as a compliance burden in the context of requirements to submit a range of other reports and data to the DPSA and to National Treasury. We provide a number of recommendations for improving the WSP process in the section below.

Summary and recommendations On the use of PSETA’s SSP to inform skills planning:

• Based on PARI’s interviews with departments over the last three years, PARI sense is that on the whole managers in HRD, even in departments that appear well managed, are not actively using the recommendations of the SSP to shape their training priorities.

• This does not mean that PSETA is not having an impact on how managers are planning for skills development in the case of the better performing departments. PSETA’s colloquiums and stakeholder engagement appear to have made an impact here.


• It appears that more work is required to disseminate the detailed content of the report to departments and to ensure this work is engaged with.

On the extent to which departments are developing plans to support the priority areas identified for support by PSETA:

• There is clearly strong support and arguably growing consensus for the priority skills proposed by PSETA.

• Based on this small sample of interviews, it appears that this has not yet translated into departments developing particular plans to develop these skills – at least not across all competencies identified.

• PSETA’s focus on SCM echoes the prioritisation of procurement capacity championed by the OCPO and thus momentum in support of building this capacity may well be developed over the next few years.

• HRD and HRM appears to be the least prioritised of these central competencies and a good deal more work is required to see verbal commitment for building capacity in these functions translated into fully fledged programmes.

• Building management capacity has long since been on departments’ agendas. PSETA has identified the need to build the appropriate curriculum content for training to develop managers’ competencies in operations management in particular (we have provided recommendations on the possible content of some of these curricula in ‘Report 1: Summary of findings from interviews with central government departments and organs of state responsible for supporting the development of competencies identified by PSETA for priority focus’).

On the WSP process:

• WSP data is not a reliable basis for national or province level skills planning, nor is the process properly supporting departments with skills planning for their own organisations.2

• A strategic decision needs to be made as to what the primary purpose of the WSP process is – if it is to provide data for the central government organisations (DHET, PSETA, DPSA) to know how departments are using their training budgets and which skills are being prioritised, there are a number of ways that the templates could be amended to incentive accurate data capture. o One option is to better align WSP and ATR templates with those used for HR Planning

and HRD implementation planning. o The ‘workload’ of completing WSPs should be reduced to increase the likelihood of

departments capturing data in the first place, and capturing data accurately. We suggest

2 We should note that the departments interviewed this year in preparation for this report are some of the better performing departments in terms of HRD. However, as PARI has noted in previous SSPs, not all of the problems with the data captured in WSPs can be accounted for in problems with the WSP templates and the compliance / reporting burden that departments face. Some of these issues relate to the weaknesses in departments ability to undertake rigorous skills audits (the Gauteng Department of Economic Development, for example, last did a skills audit five years ago – PSETA, 2014b), and then to use this to inform training in relation to their mandate.


that the number of forms to be completed in the WSP is reduced, distilling this down to the most valuable data for the purposes monitoring by PSETA and DHET. We propose that where data that can be obtained from Persal, such as data on the number of personnel falling under different occupations by race, gender and disability, is not requested in WSPs.

o Further, data that shows what departments plan to do with their training budget (amount allocated and to which programmes) should no longer be requested. The focus should be on historical data – i.e. what departments have actually done with their budget over the last year, which programmes they have actually supported and for which groups of personnel. Historical data is almost always more reliable that estimating future activity and provides a sufficient indication of trends in training across the public service.

o Data by OFO should only be requested once other systems in the public service are using this categorisation.

o These proposals could be implemented as an interim measures until such time as the implications of the new Integrated Financial Management System for HRD data capture and planning become more apparent. (This system will replace Persal – see Report 1 and National Treasury, 2015).

• If WSPs are intended to support departments internally with skills planning, then further engagement with departments is needed as to precisely which planning systems they have developed internally (these will vary across departments) and whether and in what form nationally set guidelines for data collection would support internal skills planning.

October 2015


References National Treasury. 2015. ‘Public Sector Supply Chain Management Review’, National Treasury, Pretoria. Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority (PSETA). 2015. ‘PSETA Sector Skills Plan Update 2016-‐2017’, PSETA, Pretoria, submitted to DHET for approval, August. Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority (PSETA). 2014a. ‘PSETA Sector Skills Plan Update 2015-‐2016’, PSETA, Pretoria. Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority (PSETA). 2014b. ‘The effectiveness of HR within government departments: a case study of the Gauteng Department of Economic Development and the Department of Trade and Industry’, Research Undertaken for PSETA by the Public Affairs Research Institute, Johannesburg. Public Service Sector Education and Training Authority (PSETA). 2013. ‘PSETA Sector Skills Plan Update 2014-‐2015’, PSETA, Pretoria.

Documents

PARI Report Interviews with HRD Units - PSETA