Senior civil service in public administration: The case of Britain

In ensuring the effectiveness of the administrative mechanism as a whole, it is expected that senior civil servants, who have a significant impact on the success of public administration with their knowledge, skills, experiences, and decisions, should be individuals well-versed in the expectations, desires, and needs of their country. These individuals are expected to be capable of meeting these expectations, desires, and needs in the best possible way for the public interest. Achieving this depends on the existence of a training process that imparts the necessary knowledge, skills, and experience to senior civil servants. Senior civil service is a structure characterized by the unique features of public administration and is similarly affected by the pressures faced by public administration. These variables reflecting the nature of administration also influence the training process. In the context of the thesis, in Britain, training practices have taken their current form through the influence of public administration, which can be characterized as publicprivate partnership, decentralization, flexible bureaucracy, and pragmatic management philosophy. This transformation occurred as a result of the transfer of the concepts of efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity to public administration during the managerial revolution of the 1980s, leading to changes in the duties and qualifications of senior civil servants. Accordingly, today in Britain, senior civil servants are trained in a manner that reflects current approaches to public administration: the training is not provided by the central government but by autonomous organizations; is open to those from outside of public administration; reflects contemporary approaches to public administration, aims to instill an managerial spirit in candidates, and is not limited in terms of space and time.