Capacity Building Programme for Sri Lanka Administrative Service (SLAS) Officers

SLIDA contemplates that enriching and developing the required knowledge, skills and attitudes that are necessary for continuous career development of the SLAS is one of its core responsibilities. Nurturing a continuous learning culture among the SLAS officers is of paramount importance to ensure an efficient and effective public service.

SLIDA has initiated the Capacity Building Programme with a view towards achieving the aforementioned objective and also as a measure to meet the mandatory requirement laid down under the Article 9.2 (a) of the new Service Minutes of the SLAS, that Class I and Class II SLAS officers should follow three courses and Class III officers should follow five courses approved by the Secretary to the Ministry of Public Administration. SLIDA has made efforts to the maximum if not optimum, to make use of this opportunity for the benefit of the officers. SLIDA has already completed two programmes during the year 2009 and one is in progress.

The steps involved in the strategy of developing the Capacity Building Programme were as follows: (1) assessing the required competencies; (2) diagnosing the development needs; (3) determining the learning activities (4) mapping out a personal development plan; and (5) reviewing learning regularly. The following key steps were involved in the programme development:

Behavioural competencies:-
 

Technical competencies:-

What is noteworthy is that the foci of the courses differ according to the Class; the foci for Class III, Class II and Class I courses respectively are: operational (team level), supervisory (unit level) and strategic (organisation level). 

The underlying philosophy of the programme is engaging participants in a career long continuous development process of updating and upgrading knowledge and skills in order to cope up with ever increasing challenges in a rapidly changing environment. The strategy for coping up with the above challenges includes (1) identifying the development needs; (2) taking personal responsibility for own growth; and (3) developing and initiating actions towards achieving the development goals.  This programme is only the beginning of a long journey of continuous career development. One of the unique features of the programme is that each participant should formulate a Personal Development Plan at the end of the programme, as a guide to their future career development.

The procedure being followed in the implementation of the programme is that SLIDA selects SLAS officers in batches and invites them to participate in the courses so that they could comply with the requirements of the service Minutes. The programmes to be offered in a given year are notified in the preceding year in terms of specific batches/groups. Duration of the programme for a batch is around 40 working days which includes approximately 80 sessions. In addition to the internal faculty, eminent resource personnel are drawn from the public, private and other sectors who make more emphasis on pragmatic application of skills and learning by doing in the real world situations than the conventional academic exercises confined to the class room. For this purpose, the resource persons largely make use of case studies, role plays, field visits and studies, group presentations etc. as learning modes in which participants are allowed to share their experience.

In addition to the main courses participants are offered an English language module in order to develop language skills.

The skills and competencies of the participants are assessed on the basis of the following: (a) Module based assessment which evaluates participant’s group performance and (b) end programme assessment which evaluates individual performance. Module based assessment carries 100 marks out of which participants should obtain above 50 out of 100 marks in each module. The assessments focus on a learner-centered approach. The end programme assessment requires the participant to submit (1) a comparative study report based on an external organisation that the participant visits and study, with his/her own organisation and (2) presentation of a Personal Development Plan. Both assessments count 1000 marks for each participant. The participants can achieve the grading of A,B,C, or D, based on their performance which indicate the following criteria:

A   -           Shows a high degree of competency
B   -           Moderately competent. Shows a certain degree of competence
C   -           Marginally competent. Shows a average performance.
D   -           Not adequately competent