Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 18th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview III. Working Group on Civil Service Author(s) Dubravka Prelec National School for Public Administration Zagreb Croatia Marcetic Gordana, Gordana Marčetić Title Development of a human resources development strategy in Croatian civil service File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract The overall assumption is that the Croatian Civil Service per se is determined to be prepared for the EU membership and to create institutional, organisational and cultural environment that can attract, develop and retain qualified civil servants. Facilitating this process is not merely a matter of creating, amending and revising legal and institutional provisions. This process will require a profound change of the administrative culture and therefore the way of thinking of the bearers of this culture - executives, public managers, civil servants and public employees in the wider sense. Like many other reform activities in Croatia, the civil servants’ system reforms often remained on normative and declarative level with no political commitment and preparedness for introduction of thorough organizational, functional and personal changes. Political support (or lack of it) has consequently an enormous impact on the success and continuity of administrative reforms. Therefore there is a strong need for a structure in place that all political options would consider favourable and functioning in the common national interest. The practice often shows that there is a lack of understanding about the importance of the comprehensive and participative approach to strategy development. In this sense the newly adopted 2010-2013 Civil Service HRD Strategy represents qualitative framework for attracting and promoting high quality, professional, dedicated and motivated individuals in civil service. The drafting process of this Strategy is a result of cooperation between the experts and civil servants who participated in a workshop. The participants were ministries' Secretaries General and ministries' HR department heads and staff. A SWOT analysis was conducted and a draft vision, mission and strategic objectives proposal were produced to serve as the groundwork for the development of the Strategy. The process of drafting the Action Plan for implementation of the Strategy was organised in the same, participative manner. Main strategic objectives are to: • Improve managers' development system; • Conduct continuous civil servants' training; • Improve recruitment system; • Improve the career development and good quality civil servants' retention system; • Improve organisational development. It is particularly important to start with the implementation of the first strategic objective, as many of senior civil servants are not actually public managers competent in strategy and policy development, in organization management with other managerial skills, but politically suitable persons who were recruited in public competition procedure, de facto and de iure appointed by the Government. The authors like to stress that the high level of commitment between certain number of senior civil servants and heads of HR departments towards changes is evident and that they are all willing to improve the existing HRM and HRD practice. The missing, strategic framework for HRD has been put in place now and the change process can be accelerated in order to attract, develop and retain the bright and competent people in Croatian civil service.
