New Trends in the Development of the Civil Service
The Resilience of the Civil Service, or the Limits of Flexibility
Copyright (c) 2025 Balázs István
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Excellent scientific publications are constantly appearing on the future of the civil service, or the civil service of the future, the central issue of which is to what extent the closed civil service models (the career model) developed in the 20th century are able to meet the requirements of today. The studies do not so much concern the theoretical foundations, but rather try to draw conclusions from the specific practice of individual countries towards theoretical models. The civil services operating in the world’s most advanced industrial states have common problems and there are many similarities among the answers given to them.
The essence of the problems can be best captured in the fact that the civil service seems to be losing its attractive labour market positions, which is why it is especially difficult to recruit young people, therefore it is aging, and filling certain jobs has also become difficult.
Meanwhile, the public administration, forced to respond to successive crises, would need human resources that are better adapted to the changed circumstances and have different knowledge, abilities and skills. To this end, flexible solutions are sought and applied in practice, which, although they do not intend to override the entire system framework, try to stay within the boundaries of the resilience of the civil service, but this occasionally leads to highly debatable results.
The study attempts to provide examples of these and analyse certain solutions with the intention of serving as an addition to the civil service of the future.
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