Employees, upon acquiring higher qualifications, demand higher positions and the attendant pay, well before demonstrating they have become more productive.
On the face of it, the directive by the Public Service Commission (PSC) that all senior government officers should acquire masters’ degrees within the next two years is laudable because it is interpreted to mean the higher the education of an individual, the higher their productivity.
However, most employees and even some employers do not seem to realise there is a triangular relationship between education, productivity and earnings. They tend to focus more on education and earnings, such that the correlation between education and productivity is downplayed. Employees, upon acquiring higher qualifications, demand higher positions and the attendant pay, well before demonstrating they have become more productive.
Let us consider the evaluation of productivity in an era of performance management. In performance contracting, the employer demands higher outputs from the employee through service delivery and actual measurable quantities of products. The employer does not pay attention to the inputs from the employee, such as education, as long as the outputs are satisfactory.
In the civil service, the current outputs are measured through absorption of allocated resources, collection of Appropriations-in-Aid, reduction of pending bills, implementation of citizens’ service charters and digitisation of government services.
Other outputs are the resolution of public complaints, the implementation of presidential directives, affirmative action in procurement, and asset management.
Postgraduate degrees
There is nothing in the performance contract template emanating from the Ministry of Public Service and Human Resource Management in collaboration with the PSC that these outputs can only be achieved by those with postgraduate degrees.
In fact, public servants with first degrees deployed to their respective areas of specialisation and provided with the necessary resources and political goodwill often perform well, given the experiences they acquire as they scale up the ladder in the service.
For illustrative purposes, consider the example of government drivers. A driver who left school at the primary school level or Form Four, joined the National Youth Service, trained as a driver and got employed in 1990 at the age of 20, is still in service in 2025 at the age of 55 years. That driver would most likely have started by driving manual Land Rovers and small Toyota models that were commonly used in the government then.
Over time, automatically gear-changing vehicles, such as Toyota Prados and Volkswagen Passats, have been acquired and driven by the same drivers without acquiring higher educational qualifications.
In fact, these drivers are more adept in their duties than the bosses, who have much more superior educational qualifications, that they serve because that is their area of specialisation and competency.
It is this logic that makes me think forcing a 55-year-old director to undergo crash masters’ programmes when they have served for 30 years with first degrees and attended many ‘result-oriented management courses’ and achieved the set outputs, is not necessary. Doing so would be like failing to recognise the evaluation outcomes of performance contracts that we have embraced for two decades.
Mr Sogomo is former Secretary/CEO, TSC. [email protected]. @Bsogomo
