Abstract
The recruitment and development of future managers must be regarded as a strategic issue for any organisation, and must therefore be the concern of the organisation's senior management group. In a key central public sector agency such as Northern Territory Treasury, it is the stock of intellectual capital and capability of the people in the organisation that will position the agency to provide leadership in the public sector financial management arena well into the future, rather than its hardware or processes.As with most Territory organisations, whether public, private or community sector, finding the right people is difficult as the local pool of those with the appropriate training and/or experience is often quite small. However, an undue reliance on recruiting from interstate is a strategy fraught with difficulty (in terms of cost and retention) and managers must look to other avenues for meeting their human resource needs .
One such avenue is to recruit at the entry level to the organisation and "grow your own" expertise. With this in mind, Treasury has recruited new graduates from relevant fields ever since 1988. This study endeavours to look beyond the engagement of those graduands and understand the necessary elements of a program to "grow its own" expertise. The paper examines the development requirements of trainees and the costs and benefits of developmental activities to the organisation.
Using data collected from past program participants, Treasury managers and coordinators of similar programs in other states, a Graduate Development Program for Northern Territory Treasury is designed. It embraces the most feasible and sensible features of like programs and employs several well established developmental mechanisms.
Since this study was conducted (in 1996-97), a Graduate Development Program has been implemented for Treasury in 1998. The epilogue describes the program and analyses the appraisal of its first year of operation, noting parallels with findings in this study.
| Date of Award | 1999 |
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| Original language | English |